How spiders hunt heavy prey: the tangle web as a pulley and spider's lifting mechanics observed and quantified in the laboratory

Greco, Gabriele H.; Pugno, Nicola

doi:10.1098/rsif.2020.0907

Cited by 19 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Spiders and silkworms use their silk for their biological needs, the former for hunting 3 , 14 and the latter for producing cocoons 4 , 15 , which do not require a large amount of this proteinaceous material. Moreover, spiders have a cannibalistic nature 16 , and for these reasons, it is extremely challenging to employ these animals to upscale the production of silk 17 , which makes the amount of available natural silks strictly limited.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial and natural silk materials have high mechanical property variability regardless of sample size

Greco

Mirbaha

Schmuck

et al. 2022

Sci Rep

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Silk fibres attract great interest in materials science for their biological and mechanical properties. Hitherto, the mechanical properties of the silk fibres have been explored mainly by tensile tests, which provide information on their strength, Young’s modulus, strain at break and toughness modulus. Several hypotheses have been based on these data, but the intrinsic and often overlooked variability of natural and artificial silk fibres makes it challenging to identify trends and correlations. In this work, we determined the mechanical properties of Bombyx mori cocoon and degummed silk, native spider silk, and artificial spider silk, and compared them with classical commercial carbon fibres using large sample sizes (from 10 to 100 fibres, in total 200 specimens per fibre type). The results confirm a substantial variability of the mechanical properties of silk fibres compared to commercial carbon fibres, as the relative standard deviation for strength and strain at break is 10–50%. Moreover, the variability does not decrease significantly when the number of tested fibres is increased, which was surprising considering the low variability frequently reported for silk fibres in the literature. Based on this, we prove that tensile testing of 10 fibres per type is representative of a silk fibre population. Finally, we show that the ideal shape of the stress–strain curve for spider silk, characterized by a pronounced exponential stiffening regime, occurs in only 25% of all tested spider silk fibres.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial and natural silk materials have high mechanical property variability regardless of sample size

Greco

Mirbaha

Schmuck

et al. 2022

Sci Rep

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“…However, because a gumfoot line detaches from a surface immediately after prey contact, stiffer glue proteins establish a firm adhesive bond and stiffer support lines resist thread extension ( Blackledge et al 2005 ; Wolff et al 2015 ). These fibers may be able to store more energy in their initial taunt state ( Argintean et al 2006 ; Greco and Pugno 2021 ). The elastic moduli of major ampullate fibers within L. hesperus and P. tepidariorum gumfoot lines are, on average, 105 times greater than those of the five orb-web weaving species’ flagelliform fibers ( Supplementary Table S7 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite gross similarities in molecular composition, there are notable differences in the bioadhesives of orb-webs and cobwebs. The adhesive droplets of orb-webs are supported by a pair of flagelliform fibers, which are found nowhere else in the web, whereas cobweb adhesive droplets are supported by one to four fibers, which are most likely major ampullate fibers like those forming the upper irregular thread network of a cobweb and the frame and radial threads of an orb-web ( Blackledge et al 2005 ; Boutry and Blackledge 2008 ; Greco and Pugno 2021 ). An orb-web’s capture spiral thread is suspended between adjacent radial threads and remains anchored to these after adhering to an insect ( Meyer et al 2014 ; Greco et al 2019 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When an insect contacts one or more gumfoot lines, the line’s weak pyriform anchor releases. Elastic energy stored in the gumfoot lines, and probably also in threads of the web’s upper tangle, pull the attached prey from the surface, depriving the insect of an attachment with which to more easily pull free of the gumfoot line ( Blackledge et al 2005 ; Argintean et al 2006 ; Sahni et al 2011 ; Greco and Pugno 2021 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Protein composition and associated material properties of cobweb spiders’ gumfoot glue droplets

Ayoub

Friend

Clarke

et al. 2021

Integrative and Comparative Biology

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The origin of aggregate silk glands and their production of wet adhesive silks is considered a key innovation of the Araneoidea, a superfamily of spiders that build orb-webs and cobwebs. Orb-web weavers place aggregate glue on an extensible capture spiral, whereas cobweb weavers add it to the ends of strong, stiff fibers, called gumfoot lines. Here we describe the material behavior and quantitative proteomics of the aggregate glues of two cobweb weaving species, the Western black widow, Latrodectus hesperus, and the common house spider, Parasteatoda tepidariorum. For each species respectively, we identified 48 and 33 proteins that were significantly more abundant in the portion of the gumfoot line with glue than in its fibers. These proteins were more highly glycosylated and phosphorylated than proteins found in silk fibers without glue, which likely explains aggregate glue stickiness. Most glue-enriched proteins were of anterior aggregate gland origin, supporting the hypothesis that cobweb weavers’ posterior aggregate glue is specialized for another function. We found that cobweb weaver glue droplets are stiffer and tougher than the adhesive of most orb-web weaving species. Attributes of gumfoot glue protein composition that likely contribute to this stiffness include the presence of multiple protein families with conserved cysteine residues, a bimodal distribution of isoelectric points, and families with conserved functions in protein aggregation, all of which should contribute to cohesive protein-protein interactions. House spider aggregate droplets were more responsive to humidity changes than black widow droplets, which could be mediated by differences in protein sequence, post-translational modifications, the non-protein components of the glue droplets, and/or the larger amount of aqueous material that surrounds the adhesive cores of their glue droplets.

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“…The shape of the threads was approximated as a circular cylinder. The samples were mounted on a nanotensile machine Agilent T150 UTM and the standard testing speed was 0.10 mm/s [16] . The declared sensitivity of the machine in displacement is 1 nm.…”

Section: Experimental Design Materials and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tidy dataset of the experimental design of the optimization of the alkali degumming process of Bombyx mori silk

et al. 2021

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Silk fibroin is the structural fiber of the silk filament and it is usually separated from the external protein, named sericine, by a chemical process called degumming. This process consists of an alkali bath in which the silk cocoons are boiled for a determined time. It is also known that the degumming process impacts the property of the outcoming silk fibroin fibers. In this work, we described the dataset obtained from a Design of Experiment (DoE) screening made on the alkali degumming. Four process factors were considered: the number of degumming baths, the process time, the process temperature, and the salt concentration. The data on the properties of the silk fibroin fibers were collected. In particular, the molecular weight was obtained by gel permeation chromatography (GPC), the mechanical data by tensile test and the secondary structure by Fourier Infrared Transform Spectroscopy (FTIR).

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How spiders hunt heavy prey: the tangle web as a pulley and spider's lifting mechanics observed and quantified in the laboratory

Cited by 19 publications

References 39 publications

Artificial and natural silk materials have high mechanical property variability regardless of sample size

Artificial and natural silk materials have high mechanical property variability regardless of sample size

Protein composition and associated material properties of cobweb spiders’ gumfoot glue droplets

Tidy dataset of the experimental design of the optimization of the alkali degumming process of Bombyx mori silk

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