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Spider Ecophysiology pp 303–315Cite as

Cribellar Thread

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Abstract

Cribellar prey capture thread relies on thousands of thin, dry protein fibrils to generate mechanical interlock, van der Waals, and capillary forces of adhesion. The relative humidity and the texture of the surface contacted determine the degree to which these forces contribute to thread adhesion and the stickiness a thread registers. Cribellar fibrils are drawn from spigots on a cribellum, a ventral opisthosomal spinning plate situated anterior to a spider’s spinnerets, by the calamistrum setal comb on the spider’s fourth legs. These fibrils are then formed around larger supporting fibrils to produce a composite cribellar thread, which often has a regular, puffed configuration. Cribellar thread production is plesiomorphic for the large infraorder Araneomorphae and still widely distributed among this clade, where it is used in many web forms, including the most primitive orb webs. The stickiness of cribellar thread is directly related to the number of fibrils invested in a thread. Consequently, the number of thread fibrils and the length of cribellar thread in a web, along with a spider’s ability to recycle these proteins, appear to determine the cost of using cribellar thread and to constrain the evolution of thread stickiness. This may explain why most araneomorphs no longer spin cribellar thread, abandoning it either in favor of other methods of prey capture or, in the case of modern orb-weaving spiders, replacing it with viscous capture thread.

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Acknowledgements

I thank William Eberhard for new insights into cribellar thread and helpful comments on this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA

    Brent D. Opell

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  1. Brent D. Opell
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Correspondence to Brent D. Opell .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inst. Ecology and Evolution, University of Bern, Baltzerstr. 6, Bern, 3012, Switzerland

    Wolfgang Nentwig

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Opell, B.D. (2013). Cribellar Thread. In: Nentwig, W. (eds) Spider Ecophysiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33989-9_22

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