Question: Why do you like spiders so much and why did you choose to work with biological material silk?

Beth Mortimer answered on 15 Jun 2012:

Spiders are extremely successful animals. They live in every type of habitat/home on the planet except Antartica. They are so successful because they use their different types of silks to help them catch their prey, find a mate and survive. This is different from all other animals. Other animals change their body shape or their internal biology to help them survive in a wide range of environments, but spiders have very cleverly developed a range of materials to help them do all these things. I also like spiders because of their reputation – you always get a reaction good or bad when you say you work with spiders. Whether people like them or not, people always seem to be facinated by them!

Some spiders have developed up to 8 different types of silks which all have different properties to suit their purpose. For example in an orb web (aerial web most familiar to people) the threads which go into the middle of the web are made from a very strong, energy absorbing silk. This makes these silks great for stopping their prey which is flying into their web, without breaking the web or ruining the web structure. Going round and round the web is a capture spiral silk which is extremely sticky and stretchy (it can stretch up to 3 times its original length without breaking!). This makes this silk great for wrapping round prey and keeping it in the web, so the spider can get to the prey and bite it with its poisonous fangs.

So spiders are excellent engineers. The web is expertly suited to its job to catch flying prey by not breaking or flinging the prey out of the web and sticking the prey to the web. Humans can learn a lot from spiders and silk about how to use a minimal amount of material and energy to make extremely stong and tough fibres. And remember these silks don’t require oil or chemicals like other man-made strong fibres. Silks have the potential to be very environmentally friendly materials, if we can work out how spiders do it and copy it!

So working with silk is biologically interesting, as it impacts how spiders survive, but also there are applications for the material as well, which makes silk a great material to work with for me!