Awards

• Commended for IndieFab awards (Nature) 2010

Overview

Spiders, objects of eternal human fascination, are found in many places: on the ground, in the air, and even under water. Leslie Brunetta and Catherine Craig have teamed up to produce a substantive yet entertaining book for anyone who has ever wondered, as a spider rappelled out of reach on a line of silk, 'How do they do that?' The orb web, that iconic wheel-shaped web most of us associate with spiders, contains at least four different silk proteins, each performing a different function and all meshing together to create a fly-catching machine that has amazed and inspired humans through the ages. Brunetta and Craig tell the intriguing story of how spiders evolved over 400 million years to add new silks and new uses for silk to their survival 'toolkit' and, in the telling, take readers far beyond the orb. The authors describe the trials and triumphs of spiders as they use silk to negotiate an ever-changing environment, and they show how natural selection acts at the genetic level and as individuals struggle for survival.

Full Product Details

9780300149227

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Reviews

Spider Silka wonderful, charismatic natural history of spiderswill truly inspire all readers who may never before have appreciated this unique group of organisms.Margaret Lowman, author of Life in the Treetops: Adventures of a Woman in Field Biology and of Its a Jungle Up There: More Tales from the Treetops -- Meg Lowman

This is a compelling and immensely readable account that engages the reader from start to finish and that I found difficult to put down. -Tim R./i>--Tim R. New Journal of Insect Conservation

Author Information

Leslie Brunetta is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in the New York Times, Technology Review, and the Princeton Alumni Weekly as well as on NPR and elsewhere. Catherine L. Craig, author of the monograph Siderwebs and Silk, is an internationally recognized evolutionary biologist, arachnologist, and authority on silk.

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