Standard accounts of how spiders obtain food without masticating their prey are probably largely wrong. Species in the families Uloboridae, Thomisidae, Araneidae and Theridiidae do not inject digestive fluid into the prey’s ...

Adaptive flexibility in response to environmental variation is often advantageous and occurs in many types of traits in many species. Although the basic designs of the orb webs of a given species are relatively uniform, ...

Published descriptions of egg sac construction behavior in araneids are scarce. We describe egg sac construction and oviposition in one individual of the poorly known araneid Pozonia nigroventris (Bryant 1936) and two ...

Young juveniles of L. geometricus fit the strong trend for “ontogeny to repeat phylogeny” previously documented in other web-building spiders; younger spiders were less likely to build the derived silk retreats that occur ...

Behavior can provide useful traits for testing phylogenetic hypotheses, and some details of orb web construction behavior have been especially useful in characterizing higher-level groups in spiders. The cues used to guide ...

We show that uloborid spiders, which lack the poison glands typical of nearly all other spiders, employ thousands of wrapping movements with their hind legs and up to hundreds of meters of silk line to make a shroud that ...

Feeding by uloborid spiders is unusual in several respects: cheliceral venom glands are absent; prey wrapping is extensive (up to several hundred metres of silk line) and severely compresses the prey; the spider’s mouthparts ...

Sexual selection is thought to be an important force driving the evolution of sexually dimorphic morphology and behavior, but direct experimental tests of the functions of species-specific details of morphology are rare ...

We traced the evolution of silk use by spiders in attacks on prey by combining previous publications with new observations of 31 species in 16 families. Two new prey‐wrapping techniques are described. One, in which the ...

Morphological studies have documented the tendency for male genitalia to diverge rapidly compared to other body parts in many animal groups, including spiders. But documentation of how differences in genital structures of ...