from: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/0425clay25.html

Spiders 'master' builders

Apr. 25, 2003 12:00 AM

A few of you have been asking why I haven't said anything lately about my masters, so today we will discuss spiders and the webs they weave to trap their innocent and unsuspecting prey.

By the way, I saw a picture the other day of a spider eating a fish. It was a little fish and a pretty big spider, but still, a fishing spider is not the sort of thing you see every day.

However, fishing spiders are not the spider subjects of the day. A reader asks:

What is the difference between a cobweb and a spider web?

I have my own question in this regard. How come cobweb is one word and spider web is two? That doesn't seem right.

A spider web is a pattern of silk spun by and occupied by a spider for the purpose of catching food. A cobweb is a spider web that is no longer occupied because the spider got bored with it or moved to Branson, Mo., or somewhere or died or whatever. I myself have never been to Branson, and I don't believe I'd care to go.

Anyway, without the spider there to keep things tidy, dust accumulates on the web and it gets all droopy and creepy and brushes your forehead when you go down to the basement, or it would if you had a basement.

The "cob" in cobweb comes from coppe, a Middle English word for spider.

Second spider question:

I have often noticed spider webs that will go from one bush to another, several feet apart. How do the spiders do that? Do they have little tiny ladders and climb down one bush, walk across the ground, climb up the next and then tighten up their web? Or do they jump several feet?

No, they don't get down and walk across to the next bush, and no, they don't, as a rule, swing across like Tarzan on a vine. Spiders may have little teeny brains, if they have brains, as such, but they are not entirely dim.

To start a web, most spiders extrude a long line of sticky silk and then let the breeze carry it where it will, hopefully to another bush or whatever where it will anchor and provide the first span for the web. Then the spider scurries across, reinforcing the first line with a second and so on.

Spider silk is pretty interesting stuff. It is a type of protein that come out as a liquid and forms a solid when it hits the air because that's the way its little molecules are set up to work. It is waterproof, flexible enough to be stretched two or three times its length without breaking, and ounce for ounce, it is as much as five times as strong as a thread of steel of the same diameter.

Reach Thompson at clay.thompson@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8612

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