Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating

"In Spider Silk, Leslie Brunetta and Catherine Craig offer a history of this marvelous stuff that readers will find surprisingly compelling---not only for the astonishing complexity of spider silk itself but also for the many uses for it that spiders have created over the ages. It is, in other words, the epitome of evolutionary innovation."---Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex and The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution

"This wonderful book cures arachnophobia for any lucky reader. Brunetta and Craig combine superb scholarship with engaging writing, providing a compelling introduction to evolution in action through the lens of spiders and their silks."---Simon Levin, peinceton University, author of Fragile Dominion

"From black widows to balloon-riders and bola-swingers, spider evolution depends critically on a few proteins in silk. Brunetta and Craig weave genetics and behavior into a silky-smooth portrait of this fascinating group."---Richard Wrangham, Harvard University, author of catching Fire; How Cooking Made Us Human

"Spider Silk---a wonderful, charismatic natural history of spiders---will truly in spire 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 It's a Jungle Up There: More Tales from the Treetops.

Spiders, objects of eternal human fascination, are found in many places: on the ground, in the air, and even under water. In Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating, writer Leslie Brunetta and evolutionary biologist Catherine L. 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.

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