They observed that no plugs were ever formed during mating trials, but instead, females exposed to many males produced the amorphous plugs during the egg-laying process.
The scientists made the spiders exercise by irritating them with a small paint brush and causing them to move around until they became exhausted. Spiders from the group with palps removed were able to travel 300 percent further than spiders with their palps intact.
Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and University of Costa Rica studying why spiders do not stick to their own sticky webs have discovered that a spider’s legs are protected by a covering of branching hairs and by a non-stick chemical coating. Their results are published online in the journal, Naturwissenschaften.
Jonathan Coddington, Curator of Spiders at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History describes how photography has transformed the study of arachnids.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Science Spotlight
