"Hundreds (maybe thousands) of spiders congregate between poles in the town of Santo Antonio de Plantina / PR." [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb on Feb 9, 2013 - 32 comments

Nature constantly engineers new and creative solutions to all sorts of problems—turning our stereotypes about sex upside-down along the way.
posted by Brandon Blatcher on Sep 17, 2012 - 16 comments

Untangling the mysteries of spider silk
See also Total X-Ray Scattering of Spider Dragline Silk
See also New internal structure of spider dragline silk revealed by atomic force microscopy.
See also Atomistic model of the spider silk nanostructure
posted by y2karl on May 7, 2012 - 10 comments

The story of one woman's quest to photograph spider genitalia. By day, Nina is online operations manager for American Medical News, a newspaper published by the American Medical Association. But for 13 years, she’s devoted one day a week to behind-the-scenes work at the Field Museum in Chicago: sorting, identifying, and organizing spiders in the museum’s collections, and in the process turning an enthusiast’s knowledge about arachnids into a slightly demented personal project. [more inside]
posted by srboisvert on Nov 1, 2011 - 42 comments

Stunningly Preserved 165-Million-Year-Old Spider Fossil Found
posted by nickheer on Feb 9, 2010 - 41 comments

A new and previously unknown species of spider, Cerbalus Aravensis, (photo) has been discovered in the dune of the Sands of Samar (map) in Israel's southern Arava region along the Israel-Jordan border by a team of scientists from the University of Haifa-Oranim. Cerbalus is the largest arachnid of its type in the Middle East, with a leg-span that can reach up to 5.5" (14 cm). Unfortunately, its habitat is endangered thanks for rezoning for agriculture and sand quarries. [more inside]
posted by zarq on Jan 12, 2010 - 81 comments