The delicate silk decorations spun by some orb-weaving spiders on their webs are a strange but well-known phenomena.
Turns out, the creatures use decorations as an ingenious tactic to protect their webs from damage, a new study from the University of Melbourne has revealed.
The team, led by Dr Andre Walter and Professor Mark Elgar from the University of Melbourne's Department of Zoology, found that orb-weaving spiders respond to severe damage to their webs by building bigger white silk crosses, but if the damage is mild they don't bother adding extra decoration.
Professor Mark Elgar said web damage is costly for spiders as a lot of nutritional resources are required to rebuild a web. "So they evolved this ingenious way to minimise unwanted damage," he said.
"The fact that spiders increase their decorating activity in response to severe damage but don't increase their decorating following light damage suggests that the conspicuous building of silk crosses serves to make webs more visible to animals that might accidentally walk or fly into them," Professor Elgar said.
The study was published in Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology. (ANI)
