The Daily Croissant

A barn is surrounded by webs, not snow, in Wagga Wagga.  

"The fields surrounding flood-stricken areas of NSW have been covered in the webs of a type of ground-dwelling wolf spider, says the collection manager of arachnids at the Queensland Museum, Dr Owen Seeman."

"In an attempt to escape rising waters, the spiders climb blades of grass and let out hundreds of metres of silk in the hope a gust of wind will catch the web and transport them to safety. What you are seeing is the result of all their failed attempts to get away.''

Monday 23 January 2012

It has taken eight years and more than a million Madagascar Golden Orb spiders to create a work of art "with the quality of a fairy story". And it goes on display at London's V&A museum this week.

Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley, a textile artist and a designer-entrepreneur respectively, have created a shimmering golden cape from spider silk, a fabric not woven in more than a century.

by *Blepharopsis

"Projection of confocal microscope optical sections showing three out of eight (but you may flip it along the vertical axis and you end up having six - 75% success rate!) eyes of a jumping spider.  

It's funny how the eyes of the spider remind rather those of vertebrates than insects - they are simple, as opposite to compound, have single large lens and a retina.

The two big Anterior Median eyes in the middle are long and tubular and hence have longer focal length, something akin to a telephoto lens, but which means they have a narrow field of view.

The narrow field of view means that the spider has to move its body to see in different directions, however, the eyes can move as well - or rather the retina, since the eyes are build in the carapace. You can see the retina, composed of 4 layers of tiny sensory cells, in the middle of the image. The muscles thatt accoplish its movement are visible below the lens as two bright blue tripes.

Nuclei - red (also, autofluorescence of the lenses' "coating")
Actin - blue"

Millions of spiders have crawled into trees in Pakistan to escape flood waters, shrouding them with their silky webs.

The eye-catching phenomenon is an unexpected side-effect of last year's flooding which claimed the lives of almost 2,000 people.

However, since the monsoon weather devastated the nation last July, much of the water has still not yet receded.

The tiny arachnids have sought refuge amongst the trees weaving beautifully intricate webs between the leaves. Locals say there are now fewer mosquitos reducing the risk of malaria

The branches are now so cocooned in spiders webs it gives the appearance of them being shrouded in a large net.

People in this part of Sindh, in south eastern Pakistan, near Karachi, have never seen this phenomenon before, but locals are reporting that there are now fewer mosquitos than they would expect, given the amount of stagnant, standing water that is around.