playing around with a new close-up lense today, i got a chance to witness a spider construct its own new web.
crawling around in a spiral between the “matrix strands”, it attached the sticky strand it continuously produced – sometimes by just “bumping” the matrix with its opisthosoma (where the spinnerets are), and sometimes by handling the strand with its (far) back legs.
very fascinating to watch.
there’s also a high(er)-quality video: [view video: spiderweb construction] (zipped avi/xvid, 7MB)
the photos turned out all crappy, because it was later in the evening already…