Gravitationally challenged spiders in space

AGTrauger · Gravitationally challenged spiders in space

COOL EXPERIMENT; drunken

SPIDERS IN SPACE:
Gravitationally challenged orb-weaving spiders aboard the international space station have not lost their ability to spin webs in weightlesness, but they seem to have lost their sense of symmetry.

An experiment designed for school kids, devoted to exploring the life cycle of the painted lady butterfly and the webs of orb-weaving spiders, was inspected today, prompting this exchange between the station and ground controllers:

"When the spider hab was removed from the CTV, Mike (Fincke) had made the comment that it was 'beautiful.' Does that mean that it was an organized-looking web, or just something really neat to see?" a controller asked.

"Yeah, the web was more or less three dimensional and it looks like it was all over the inside of the spider hab," station flight engineer Sandra Magnus replied. "We took a couple of pictures of it so hopefully they'll turn out."

"OK, so it was more of a tangled, disorganized-looking web than a standard, like Charlotte's web kind of web?"

"Exactly," Magnus agreed. "There was no symmetry that was noticeable in it."

Celeste

Well, if you've ever watched an orb weaver spin its web, it uses the direction of gravity to orient its initial "Y" and the subsequent radial lines, and then does the spiral thing from the outside inward. So not having gravity would prevent them from getting their intial "Y" and the *plane* of the web set up properly... (Poor things!) Once they got that set up, though, I bet they could do the spiral correctly, even in zero-g, since they just follow the rim inwards.

Celeste

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_webs_in_space

:-(

AGTrauger

Interesting that the web thickness was not uniform. Jeez those astronauts could have done a better job keeping them alive Mad

Celeste

Well, the web has to have a certain tensile strength, and I'm guessing they might use gravitational cues (their own weight, for example) to determine how thick to make the strands. Either that, or the strands thicknesses are determined by how quickly they spew out the webbing from their spinnerets, and maybe they have a hard time playing it out at a uniform rate in zero-g?

Yeah -- I was really bummed that those first two on Skylab died of possible dehydration! There's no excuse for that.

DeniseCasey

Here is another link of spiders and butterflies in space.

http://www.bioedonline.org/space/index.cfm