Spiders again

The spider never finished the lacewing. I found the body lying on the floor, still the spider was looking nice and plump. Did you know spiders are amazing (Hannah take note), they can go for up to a year without a meal and when they do eat they can consume the equivalent of their own body weight in grub. However spiders have to digest their food outside their body by secreting enzymes and juices into their prey, then sucking it up it already digested, this is called external digestion. It is not unusual for spiders to eat spiders, even there own brothers and sisters. Spiders are not generally fussy about what they eat but can taste their food and will reject it if it doesn't like the flavour. Spiders catch their prey in a variety of different ways. We all know the beautiful webs that are one method. Research by NASA on orb web spiders investigated the effect of giving various drugs on their ability to create beautiful webs. Drugs administered included cannabis, caffeine, speed to name but a few. The way spiders spun their webs varied wildly depending on the drug they were given. Have a look at some of the webs, the one below is from a spider on caffeine and the one below that is by a spider on LSD.

Caffeine

LSD

It may be helpful for some of us to note that spiders given caffeine produced the most useless webs of all the spiders in the test. And to think we drink this stuff all the time and then try and drive cars or work, help.

Anyway you probably knew all this anyway I have enjoyed reminding myself how amazing spiders are. I shall look at them differently now, until the next time I am clearing up cobwebs that is.