If you’re like me, you’ve lived a life full of bittersweet emotion towards spiders. When you’re young, you learn that spiders are great predators, in that they wish to eat all the bugs that burden you with their obnoxious ear-buzzing antics. As you grow older, and the world looks a bit smaller, even though you’ve learned to keep it together when an unidentified insect appears before you, most spiders are still FREAKY as hell, i.e. if you feel a tingling on your arm and you imagine it to be a harmless stray hair, but instead you turn to see eight tense legs proceeding vigilantly towards your shoulder, you’re gonna be creeped out. Which leads me to an experience I had one day at a nondescript gas station, where I was cooly and calmly pumping gas and I look up to see a LARGE wolf spider weaving one humble abode for herself. My first reaction was a near-silent gasp, because who knew when she was gonna want to jump ship and start crawling up my sleeve. But as I gaped, I saw that she was doing something quite impressive with that able abdomen of hers. Although I had missed the first stage in the building of her orb web, where she connects the threads at one point in the center, I was watching her construct the concentric rings that comprise most of the web. In such a methodical way, she spun a few support rings from the outermost thread to the center, and then traversed back out and proceeded to fill in between the rings in a way that seemed so flawless I knew she had woken up today with that web in mind, ready to spin. So, my point being, even though spiders have a knack of appearing seemingly out of nowhere just to spook you, they are evolutionary wonders. This experience at the gas station led me to do some research on spider silk, and I found some really neat info.

Spider silk has primary and secondary properties that give it durability and stretch. The primary composition is made of glycine and alanine (amino acids) blocks. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins in our bodies and in other organisms, and are responsible for many microbiological functions. With respect to spider silk, amino acids provide a sturdy backbone in the form of proteins to retain the cylindrical shape of the silk. The secondary composition includes these same amino acids arranged in beta sheets (alanine) and connected by a gel-like matrix (glycine). Beta sheets are relatively neat and organized sheets of amino acids connected through hydrogen molecules bonding to oxygen molecules, which increase stability of the silk, and the amorphous linkages of glycine provide stretchiness, making it a versatile material. In addition to these proteins, spider silk also contains certain compounds to protect the nature and integrity of the silk. Pyrrolidine, a secondary amine, is found in Golden Orb spiders, and keeps the silk moist in order to ward off ants. This substance is also found in tobacco leaves. Potassium hydrogen phosphate (HKPO4) raises the acidity of the silk in order to protect from bacterial and fungal degradation. Potassium nitrate (KNO4) prevents denaturing of the silk by keeping the acidity in check. Spider silk is also rich in Vitamin K, which aids in blood coagulation and open wound healing.

There’s much more that can be said of the spider’s silk and other evolutionary characteristics, but for now, if you see a spider and have the urge to squash, remember that they too contain multitudes, as do you and I.

[Image: Finale (Sonata of the Sun) – Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis]