If you're a bit squeamish... then maybe ya better not read this...!
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Black Widow spiders live in warm climates... and like to set up their webs in places that will catch the most number of bugs...!
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Smelly toilets have odours and moisture that attract the spider's hapless insect victims...! (Especially outdoor toilets)
This spider likes hiding under the lip of a toilet bowl... and spins its web across the seat to catch anything that flies in to have a meal of poop!!!!!
NEEDLESS TO SAY...!
Men going to the toilet to have a dump... take their pants down... and then sit on the toilet seat... with their balls hanging down below them!
IF his balls touch the spider's web... it runs out and bites him... (GUESS WHERE?) and that's why most of the Black Widow Spider bites result in a very painful death!!!!!!
The ray spider is smaller than a grain of rice. It spins its web as a classic set of concentric "circles" with spokes radiating outwards. But then, the spider strings a thread from the center of the web to a nearby rock or twig. It then grabs the middle of the web with its back legs and then pulls itself along that tension line with its front legs.
"That is what turns that web from a flat shape into a cone shape," says Han. The conical web is now spring loaded. When an insect flutters by, the spider releases the tension line, flinging the web forward and entangling the prey.
"So they're not just passively sitting there," Han says. "They're using the web like a slingshot without the insect ever touching the web."
This is unusual, and Han wanted to know how the ray spider figures out when to sling its web.
During her Ph.D. at the University of Akron, she collected ray spiders from the local parks. "I would just go around peering into cracks and crevices," she recalls. "I would see that tiny little spider. Then I would grab it."
Han also grabbed a bunch of spider prey. "I was just standing around in various places waiting for mosquitos to land on me and then I would catch them," she says.
Back in the lab, she glued those mosquitos to little paper strips. "We started calling them mosquito lollipops because it was just like this mosquito flying around at the end of the stick," she says. "So I would then slowly move it in towards the spider," all while recording everything using high speed video.
Three out of four times when Han moved the tethered mosquito towards the front of the capture cone, the spider launched its web at an acceleration up to 51 g's.
"It's just like instantaneous practically — a fraction of a fraction of a second," says Han. An insect "would never really see it coming."
Han then tried the same experiment with a tuning fork that vibrated at a frequency akin to an insect beating its wings — just much stronger. The ray spiders flung their webs when the tuning fork was farther away than the mosquitos had been.
Han concluded that ray spiders release their webs in response to airborne prey vibrations, determining both the direction and distance to those vibrations to capture the insect at the right moment.
A little inspiration
"There still are a lot of questions in exactly what's going on," says Han. For instance, she isn't sure how the spider detects the vibrations.
"The vibrations are hitting the silk," she says. "They're also probably stimulating the spider's body, its sensory hairs. So through one of those or some combination, the spider becomes aware that this insect is approaching the web."
Han also can't be sure how the spider deduces when an insect is close enough to the web to capture it.
Nevertheless, she says this is the first time to her knowledge that scientists have documented spiders activating their whole webs to attack prey before they hit those sticky filaments.
"Spiders may be using their webs as greater sensory devices than we previously thought," suggests Han. "The web is kind of like the spider's ear."
"It's exciting to see it in print now because we've been talking about [the idea] for years," says Symone Alexander, a chemical engineer at Auburn University who wasn't involved in the research. She says that spiders are masters of designing webs that allow them to detect stress and strain precisely.
"These spiders — the geometry of their web is slightly different and it's tensed in a different way," Alexander says. "Can we use that as inspiration for building these sensing systems in airplane wings or other materials?"
In other words, Alexander is hoping that scientists can continue to invite the spider-verse to improve the human-verse.
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