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Spinmeisters

Natural History, Nov, 2003 by Stephan Reebs

You wouldn't think spider webs could be part of the fossil record--and if it weren't for the preservative power of amber, they wouldn't be. Scrutinizing a fragment of Lebanese amber 130 million years old, Samuel Zschokke, a biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, discovered a thread of spider silk a sixth of an inch long, studded with thirty-eight minuscule droplets of glue. Both the diameter of the thread and the size, shape, and arrangement, of the droplets are nearly identical to those of modern web-weaving spiders.

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The specimen, whose true identity had remained unrecognized since 1969, came from the world's oldest deposits of amber containing insect remains. Fossilized spinnerets (the organs that spit out the spider silk) that occur in Middle Devonian rocks in Schoharie County, New York, show that spiders have been making silk for at least 380 million years. But there's no evidence that the threads made by those ancient spinnerets were gluey. Zschokke's discovery thus establishes the earliest time that spider webs became sticky. ("Spider-web silk from the Early Cretaceous," Nature 424:636-37; August 7, 2003)

Spinmeisters

Natural History, Nov, 2003 by Stephan Reebs

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