Spiders can ‘tune’ webs to locate objects
Funded by the ERC, scientists in the UK have discovered that spiders can ‘tune’ their silk webs in a similar way to musical instruments.
Beth Mortimer, a biology lecturer at Oxford University, said that spider silk has been evolving for more than 350 years and remains something that scientists are unable to recreate.
Mortimer and her colleagues at the Oxford Silk Group have discovered that many of the silk strands in a web vibrate like the strings of a musical instrument like a guitar or a violin. She told NPR that “for a certain length of string, you can have different pitches that come out of your instrument”.
An instrument string’s thickness, length and tension determine the pitch of the sound it produces when plucked. It has been discovered that spiders are aware of this in relation to their webs, largely due to sensors in their legs. The golden orb weavers studied are able to distinguish between different vibrations or pitches travelling up and down the silk web.
Spiders sometimes tighten or loosen silk strands to alter the way each string resonates. Mortimer explained that the spider can “very finely tune how the silks are vibrating”.
The Silk Group said the vibrations coursing through the web provide information to the spider, which will ‘read’ these vibrations to locate where a struggling insect has been snagged. Spiders are also capable of ‘playing’ the web to “monitor the echoes that come back so it can locate objects”.
