Comment by bitwize
1 day ago
> Spiders don’t actually shoot their silk into the air. They make contact with a surface first, attach a strand, then pull and arrange their webs with careful choreography.
Spiders don't shoot their silk into the air when spinning a web. Some spiders, however, migrate by ballooning: they stand upside down, rear ends (and spinnerets) in the air, and send a thread of silk skyward, where it catches the wind or heat currents and lifts the spider toward parts unknown.
This beautiful BBC video about Darwin's Bark Spider (a species that spits the longest silk threads and makes the largest spider webs), narrated by Sir David Attenborough is phenomenal:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gSwvH6YhqIM
Spiders and Nature are incredible!
> they stand upside down, rear ends (and spinnerets) in the air, and send a thread of silk skyward, where it catches the wind or heat currents and lifts the spider toward parts unknown.
That was such a great sad-happy scene in Charlotte’s Web.
I want to see a film about the adventures of Peter Parker bitten by that kind of spider
Anecdote: I feel I've seen a spider drop from the thread I'm holding it from, and hang from a completely new one as it falls
This is called a drop or anchor line, spiders use them often for climbing smooth or difficult surfaces slowly and for quick escapes.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_silk#Uses
Do they send it or do they unspool it as the wind begins to tug at the little bit hanging out of them?
Can't push a rope.
You can feed a rope out of something (see: 3D printer extruders)