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The notable tensile strength of spider webs is often exaggerated in science fiction, often as a plot device to justify the presence of artificially giant spiders. [ 53 ] [ 54 ] Posters used by the women at Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp often featured the symbol of a spider web, meant to symbolise the fragility as well as the perseverance ...
The average toughness of the fibres is 350 MJ/m 3, and some are up to 520 MJ/m 3, making the silk twice as tough as any other spider silk known. [8] The web of Darwin's bark spider is remarkable in that it is not only the longest spanning web ever observed, but is the largest orb web ever seen, at an area of up to 2.8 square metres (30 sq ft). [2]
(Spider dragline silk has a tensile strength of roughly 1.3 GPa. The tensile strength listed for steel might be slightly higher – e.g. 1.65 GPa, [24] [25] but spider silk is a much less dense material, so that a given weight of spider silk is five times as strong as the same weight of steel.)
The tensile strength for the three kinds of silk measured in the Blackledge study was about 1,000 MPa. The ultimate strength reported in a previous study for Trichonephila edulis was 1,290 ± 160 MPa. [22] The tensile strength of spider silk is comparable to that of steel wire of the same thickness.
Trichonephila clavipes (formerly known as Nephila clavipes), commonly known as the golden silk orb-weaver, golden silk spider, golden orb weaver spider or colloquially banana spider (a name shared with several others), is an orb-weaving spider species which inhabits forests and wooded areas ranging from the southern US to Argentina. [3]
The spider is able to adjust pigment intensity relative to background light levels and color; the range of spectral reflectance is specifically adapted to insect vision. The webs of most Nephila spiders are complex, with a fine-meshed orb suspended in a maze of non-sticky barrier webs. As with many weavers of sticky spirals, the orb is renewed ...
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Trichonephila spiders produce large asymmetric orb webs up to 1.5 m (5 ft) in diameter. [citation needed] Trichonephila species remain in their webs permanently, so have a higher predation risk. The golden silk orb-weaver is named for the yellow color of the spider silk used to construct these webs.