BCP 102 AC: V8 (First Timers)

INCREDIBLE SPIDER WEBS: The drag line is the strong silk that a spider uses when it drops down, like in the children’s poem “Little Miss Muffet.”

INCREDIBLE SPIDER WEBS: When the wind or an insect stretches a spiderweb when they fly into it,  a spider web springs back like a baseball pitch-back.

INCREDIBLE SPIDER WEBS: A single web strand is made of “springs”– protein nano-spring fibers–and sugar crystals. Springs and crystals… how odd!

INCREDIBLE SPIDER WEBS: Unlike an arm-spring exerciser, no matter how far you pull out the nano-springs in webs, the amount of force needed to pull them further is the same.

INCREDIBLE SPIDER WEBS: The crystals themselves do not stretch like the rest of the web does, but they add important strength.

INCREDIBLE SPIDER WEBS: The web-pudding is drawn into one of dozens of tubes connected to the piriform gland spigots that make up each of the spider’s spinnerets. The web-pudding enters these glands with a pH of 7. It’s as neutral as water when it begins.

INCREDIBLE SPIDER WEBS: As the soup-mix of “spider web mix” moves thorough the narrowing tubes, the pH changes in hundredths of a second at exactly the right places. It reaches a pH which is the same as a cup of coffee.

INCREDIBLE SPIDER WEBS: These wild nano-springs are plopped between incredibly small lego brick-shaped crystals. These crystals are made of a protein like the tapetum lucid protein crystals that reflect light from dog’s eyes. 

INCREDIBLE SPIDER WEBS: 11.5. is the pH that the animation says is what the spider lifts the pH to for the strand to strengthen into a full-strength spider web.

INCREDIBLE SPIDER WEBS: The webbing acts like a liquid wire. The thousands of sticky droplets that the spider places on the web serve as tighteners like winches on a truck.