April 27, 2018
A long-running and fiercely debated question among scientists "Did spiders evolve to spin the orb web only once? Or multiple times?" may have an answer in a new study in Current Biology, led by a team of researchers including Gonzalo Giribet and postdoctoral fellow, Rosa Fernández. The research team compared approximately 2,500 genes from 159 spider species to draw a new family tree containing multiple distinct branches of orb-weaving spiders. Based on their analysis, the team believes the ability to make orb webs arose multiple times. Media: New York Times
Image: The work of a long-jawed orb-weaver in Queensland, Australia. The new tree shows that spiders that make sticky orb webs are all closely related, but the makers of non-sticky orb webs have an ancestor that didn’t use a web for hunting. Credit Gustavo Hormiga