Like Spider-man, This Spider Shoots Silk to Attack
Gnaphosids—better known as ground spiders—don't spin typical spider webs. Instead, they catch prey, even those much larger than themselves, by shooting sticky silk to immobilize them, according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
This means the ground spiders can actively hunt for their prey, rather than waiting for their meals to get caught in a web.
Jonas Wolff, from Macquarie University in Australia, and a team of researchers became intrigued by ground spiders when observing their silk-producing glands: the ground spiders had fewer, but much larger, silk-producing glands compared to other web-spinning spider species.
Thanks to the large spigots, which allow the silk to be expelled, this means the ground spiders can eject dense layers of the gluey