The brown recluse spider spins a silk unlike any other produced by known arachnids or insects. Instead of being round, the recluse silk fibers are flat and extremely thin, like a silky nanoribbon. And they’re spotted with tiny spherical dots, a team of scientists reports today in Advanced Materials.
“It’s so distinct from the traditional silks many of us look at,” said David Kaplan, a biopolymers engineer at Tufts University who was not involved in this study. “How you spin something with that shape is not trivial. The mechanism is something worth looking at in detail, with broad implications.”
via Wired
Image: Hannes Schniepp
