Spider silk: Webs measure up

The complete elastic response of a spider's orb web has been quantified by non-invasive light scattering, revealing important insights into the architecture, natural material use and mechanical properties of the web. Developing advanced materials based on principles learnt from natural ones, like silk, can be an alternative to the laborious trial-and error approach conventionally used. The identification of the web's stiffness tensor helps to answer several questions, in particular, about the mechanical response of silk materials and how they play together in a web. Using these data, it is possible to predict the mechanical response of an orb web under gravity loading as a result of morning dew, including the effects on web stiffness and vibration signal transfer. It would be interesting to investigate the link between the amino acid sequence and the molecular structure of silk to the mechanical properties of webs and other macroscale architectures, like cocoons or funnel web.