Spider Webs
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Different spider nets
Many people point to the eye as being a very complex organ. When I want to think about God and His craftsmanship, I like to think about spiderwebs! There are many different spiders that use their webs in different ways. This inherited behavior is so varied. I used to think, "yeah, spiderwebs cover a space, a fly zips through and gets stuck", and that's all there is to it. Check out these differences:
- Triangle Weaver - winds up its web on one line. When prey is stuck, it releases some tension in the anchor line, causing the spider to fly toward the prey at the same time the web collapses onto the prey.
- Sheet-web Weaver - web is horizontal and the spider hangs below it. Most of the webbing isn't sticky except for a few strands. The spider bites the prey through the webbing and pulls them in.
- Redback Spider - lays down vertical strands, and singular horizontal ones below these. When a prey walks into a horizontal one and begins to struggle, the line breaks below and lifts the prey into the air where they dangle, waiting for the spider to pull them up and get them. BBC Earth
- Bolas Spider - makes a sticky blob at the end of a web line. It then swings this "bolas" around to catch prey. BBC Earth
- Trapdoor Spider - hides in the ground behind a trapdoor made of silk and grabs prey as they walk by.
- Diving Bell Spider - makes a web under water much like a diving bell, even brings oxygen down and puts it inside the webbing.
- Olios coenobitus - pulls snail shell up using web to make a home. BBC
- Jumping Spider - jumps around, hunts other spiders, lowers itself with web onto other spider to kill it. BBC Earth (Check out Peacock Spider for more coolness.)
I am a computer programmer by trade. If I were writing an AI monster for a game, it would take many lines of code to get the AI spider to do each of those different food-gathering techniques. I can only imagine what differences there are in the spiders' DNA sequence needed to program this complex behavior.