Tag Archive | "spiders"

How photography has transformed the study of spiders and their webs

How photography has transformed the study of spiders and their webs

Jonathan Coddington, Curator of Spiders at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History describes how photography has transformed the study of arachnids. [...more]

Video Comments (0)

8 strange but true spider facts

8 strange but true spider facts

In honor of Halloween, Michael Miller, keeper in the National Zoological Park's Invertebrate Exhibit, shares a few of his favorite "strange-but-true" spider facts. [...more]

zoology Comments (4)

Suitor’s gentle massage soothes aggressive, cannibalistic female spiders, researchers find

Suitor’s gentle massage soothes aggressive, cannibalistic female spiders, researchers find

A new study by a team of scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the National University of Singapore and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts have unlocked the secret to mate binding in orb web spiders, and revealed just how it calms the cannibalistic female spider. [...more]

Featured, Research Topics, zoology Comments (0)

Don’t pick a fight with a eunuch spider. It has nothing to lose

Don’t pick a fight with a eunuch spider. It has nothing to lose

In a recent study of the mating behavior of these Asian spiders, researchers found that 87.5 percent of males had both palps amputated during copulation. [...more]

Featured, zoology Comments (1)

Newly discovered Madagascar spider spins largest, toughest webs on record

Newly discovered Madagascar spider spins largest, toughest webs on record

Darwin's bark spider cast giant webs across streams, rivers and lakes, suspending the web’s orb above water and attaching it to plants on each riverbank. Bridgelines of these water-spanning webs have been measured as long as 25 meters. [...more]

Featured, zoology Comments (5)

Meet our Scientists—Videos!

Science Spotlight

This fossil represents a new genus and species of extinct aneuretopsychid, Jeholopsyche liaoningensis, recently described in a paper in the journal ZooKeys by Conrad Labandeira of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Dong Ren and ChungKun Shih of the College of Life Sciences, Capital Normal University, Beijing. The aneuretopsychidae are a family of long-proboscid insects that lived in Asia from the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous. The paper documents the first formal record of fossil Aneuretopsychidae in China. The new fossils reveal previously unknown and detailed structure of the mouthparts, antennae, head, thorax, legs and abdomen of this distinctive insect lineage.

Science Spotlight Archives