Spider Silk : Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating

by Leslie Brunetta and Catherine L. Craig

• ISBN13: 9780300149227
• ISBN10: 0300149220
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2010-06-08
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

Spiders, objects of eternal human fascination, are found in many places: on the ground, in the air, and even under water. Leslie Brunetta and Catherine Craig have teamed up to produce a substantive yet entertaining book for anyone who has ever wondered, as a spider rappelled out of reach on a line of silk, "How do they do that?" The orb web, that iconic wheel-shaped web most of us associate with spiders, contains at least four different silk proteins, each performing a different function and all meshing together to create a fly-catching machine that has amazed and inspired humans through the ages. Brunetta and Craig tell the intriguing story of how spiders evolved over 400 million years to add new silks and new uses for silk to their survival "toolkit" and, in the telling, take readers far beyond the orb. The authors describe the trials and triumphs of spiders as they use silk to negotiate an ever-changing environment, and they show how natural selection acts at the genetic level and as individuals struggle for survival.

Author Biography

Leslie Brunetta is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in the New York Times and Technology Review as well as on NPR and elsewhere. Catherine L. Craig, author of the monograph Spiderwebs and Silk, is an internationally recognized evolutionary biologist, arachnologist, and authority on silk.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xv
A Timeline of the Spider Fossil Record	p. xvii
Fossils	p. 1
Living Fossils	p. 16
Chance and Change	p. 25
Outward and Upward	p. 41
Triumph over Thin Air	p. 56
Small Changes, Big Benefits	p. 73
Spinning, Running, Jumping, Swimming	p. 96
Going Vertical	p. 111
Links	p. 136
Now You See It, Now You Don't	p. 157
Beyond "Perfect"	p. 171
Endless Forms	p. 186
Notes	p. 193
Glossary	p. 199
Bibliography	p. 205
Index	p. 219
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