Spinneret
The spinneret is the organ that spiders use to synthesize spider silk . It is usually found on the underside of the abdomen , in the abdomen segment of the animals. Most spiders have six spinning glands, but some only have four or two. These glands can be used individually or together to create the cobweb .
The silk solution, which contains a very high polymer concentration as well as sodium chloride , from which the spider threads are made, is found in the spinneret . The sodium chloride serves to suppress the formation of oligomers , which occurs when the table salt is removed. If the silk solution is pushed out through the spinneret, the proteins, which are initially close together, unroll. After this procedure, the spider silk is fed out through the spinnerets .
Spinning glands on the feet of large spiders (e.g. the striped Guatemala tarantula ) as a climbing aid were often suspected, but could not be clearly identified.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ David P. Knight and Fritz Vollrath in Nature . See spider silk unchanged for 125 million years. In: Wissenschaft.de. April 6, 2001, accessed May 1, 2015 .
- ^ SN Gorb, S. Niederegger, CY Hayashi, AP Summers, W. Votsch, P. Walther: Biomaterials: silk-like secretion from tarantula feet . In: Nature . tape 443 , no. 7110 , September 2006, p. 407 , PMID 17006505 .
- ^ Rainer F. Foelix, Bastian Rast, Anne M. Peattie: Silk secretion from tarantula feet revisited: alleged spigots are probably chemoreceptors. In: The Journal of Experimental Biology. 215, 2012, pp. 1084-1089. doi: 10.1242 / jeb.066811