A spider web that spans rivers made from the world’s toughest biological material

This is an arachnophobe’s worst nightmare: the largest spider web in the world. It belongs to the Darwin’s bark spider, which spins its gargantuan trap over entire rivers and lakes. Its shape – a simple ‘orb web’ – is normal enough, but its size is anything but. The main anchor thread that holds the web in place to both riverbanks can be as long as 25 metres and the main sticky core can be as large as 2.8 square metres.

With a web that big, it’s no surprise that Darwin’s bark spider uses the toughest silk of any species. It can resist twice as much force as any other spider silk before rupturing, and over 10 times more than a similarly sized piece of Kevlar. It’s not just the apex of spider silk – it’s the toughest biological material ever found.