Laboratory of Bio-inspired, Bionic, Nano, Meta Materials and Mechanics, Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering, University of Trento, Via Mesiano, 77, 38123 Trento, Italy.
School of Engineering and Material Science, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK.
J R Soc Interface. 2021 Feb;18(175):20200907. doi: 10.1098/rsif.2020.0907. Epub 2021 Feb 3.
The spiders of Theridiidae's family display a peculiar behaviour when they hunt extremely large prey. They lift the quarry, making it unable to escape, by attaching pre-tensioned silk threads to it. In this work, we analysed for the first time in the laboratory the lifting hunting mechanism and, in order to quantify the phenomenon, we applied the lifting mechanics theory. The comparison between the experiments and the theory suggests that, during the process, spiders do not stretch the silk too much by keeping it in the linear elastic regime. We thus report here further evidence for the strong role of silk in spiders' evolution, especially how spiders can stretch and use it as an external tool to overcome their muscles' limits and capture prey with large mass, e.g. 50 times the spider's mass.
蟹蛛科的蜘蛛在捕食非常大的猎物时会表现出一种特殊的行为。它们通过将预先拉紧的蛛丝附着在猎物上，从而将其提起，使其无法逃脱。在这项工作中，我们首次在实验室中分析了这种提起猎物的机制，并应用提升力学理论对其进行了量化。实验与理论的比较表明，在这个过程中，蜘蛛通过保持蛛丝在线性弹性范围内，不会过度拉伸蛛丝。因此，我们在这里报告了更多关于蛛丝在蜘蛛进化中起到的重要作用的证据，特别是蜘蛛如何拉伸并将其用作外部工具来克服肌肉的限制，并捕获质量大的猎物，例如 50 倍于蜘蛛自身质量的猎物。
