16-03-16 Would you be willing to spend each night in the company of 300,000 bats -- all in the service of science? UCLA biologist Kenneth Chapin did just that, for several weeks in 2012 and 2014, while conducting research in darkened caves in Puerto Rico. In...

16-03-15 Spiders are known to be the classic example of insectivorous predators. Zoologists from the University of Basel, the US and UK have now been able to show that their diet is more diverse than expected. Their findings show that spiders like to spice u...

16-01-14 Using web samples from black widow spiders fed with crickets, researchers at the University of Notre Dame have successfully used DNA samples to identify both the spider and the species of its prey. Such noninvasive sampling to obtain genetic informa...

15-07-14 Male black widow spiders destroy large sections of the female's web during courtship and wrap it up in their own silk. New research published in Animal Behaviour shows that this home-wrecking behavior deters rival males, by making the female's web l...

15-07-07 Spiders travel across water like ships, using their legs as sails and their silk as an anchor, according to research published in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. The study helps explain how spiders are able to migrate across vast d...

14-06-20 Spiders are traditionally viewed as predators of insects. Zoologists from Switzerland and Australia have now published a study that shows: spiders all over the world also prey on fish. The academic journal PLOS ONE has just published the results. Al...

13-11-21 Scientists discover three new gorgeous species of the wafer trapdoor genus Fufius -- F. minusculus, F. jalapensis, and F. candango. The discovery of the three new species, published in the open access journal ZooKeys, paves the road to understanding...

12-07-05 Brown widow spiders are relatively new to North America, where they were first documented in Florida in 1935, and even newer to southern California, where they were only recently discovered in 2003. However, in the last decade they have been so succ...

12-01-09 Research was published this week showing that silk produced by transgenically-engineered silkworms（蚕） in the laboratory of Malcolm Fraser Jr., professor of biological sciences at University of Notre Dame, exhibits the highly sought-after strength...

11-03-30 Insects using vibration to attract a mate are at risk of being eaten alive by killer spiders, Cardiff University scientists have discovered. Studying spider behaviour experts from Cardiff University's School of Biosciences found that the vibrations...