Spider in sentence

189 examples of Spider in a sentence

These are spinneret glands on the abdomen of a spider.

And yet the spider manages to do it at ambient temperature and pressure with raw materials of dead flies and water.

And this spider spins a bilingual alphabet.

So this spider goes through the whole alphabet with identical adjectives and substantives.

Turning rocks over revealed this crab spider grappling with a beetle.

Even fossil spiders can make silk, as we can see from this impression of a spinneret on this fossil spider.

So this means that both spiders and spider silk have been around for 380 million years.

There are many kinds of spider silk.

For example, this garden spider can make seven different kinds of silks.

How does an individual spider make so many kinds of silk?

To answer that, you have to look a lot closer at the spinneret region of a spider.

So silk comes out of the spinnerets, and for those of us spider silk biologists, this is what we call the "business end" of the spider.

We spend long days and nights staring at this part of the spider.

Each of these silk fibers exits from the spigot, and if you were to trace the fiber back into the spider, what you would find is that each spigot connects to its own individual silk gland.

So if you ever have the opportunity to dissect an orb-web-weaving spider, and I hope you do, what you would find is a bounty of beautiful, translucent silk glands.

Inside each spider, there are hundreds of silk glands, sometimes thousands.

In an orb-web-weaving spider, you can find seven types of silk glands, and what I have depicted here in this picture, let's start at the one o'clock position, there's tubuliform silk glands, which are used to make the outer silk of an egg sac.

But what, exactly, is spider silk?

Nearly all of these proteins can be explained by a single gene family, so this means that the diversity of silk types we see today is encoded by one gene family, so presumably the original spider ancestor made one kind of silk, and over the last 380 million years, that one silk gene has duplicated and then diverged, specialized, over and over and over again, to get the large variety of flavors of spider silks that we have today.

To give you an idea of what a spider silk protein looks like, this is a dragline silk protein, it's just a portion of it, from the black widow spider.

Silks made by the same spider can have dramatically different repeat sequences.

At the top of the screen, you're seeing the repeat unit from the dragline silk of a garden argiope spider.

And on the bottom, this is the repeat sequence for the egg case, or tubuliform silk protein, for the exact same spider.

This makes testing spider silk really, really easy to do in the laboratory, because we're actually, you know, testing it in air that's exactly the environment that spiders are using their silk proteins.

Here are stress-strain curves generated by tensile testing five fibers made by the same spider.

There's quite a bit of variation within the fibers that an individual spider can make.

We call that the tool kit of a spider.

That's what the spider has to interact with their environment.

But how about variation among spider species, so looking at one type of silk and looking at different species of spiders?

These are the two species of spiders for which the vast majority of time and money on synthetic spider silk research has been to replicate their dragline silk proteins.

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