Original paper: Hygroscopic Compounds in Spider Aggregate Glue Remove Interfacial Water to Maintain Adhesion in Humid Conditions
If you were Spider-Man, how would you catch your criminals? You could tangle them up in different types of threads, but to really keep them from escaping you would probably want your web to be sticky (not to mention the utility of sticky silk for swinging between buildings). Like Spider-Man, the furrow spider spins a web with sticky capture silk to trap its prey. This silk gets its stickiness from a layer of glue that coats the thread. What makes this capture silk really interesting is that, unlike commercial glues, these spider glues don’t fail when wet.
The tendency for water to interfere with glues should come as no surprise. For example, sticky bandages become unstuck when they’re wet, whether it’s because of swimming, taking a shower, or going for a run on a humid day. This interference occurs on the microscopic scale, where water prevents the components of a glue from forming adhesive chemical bonds. Even just high humidity provides enough water vapor in the air for it to condense on nearby surfaces and interfere with adhesion. One would naturally expect this very general and simple mechanism to cause problems for spiders that lay traps near water, as our furrow spider does. As you may have guessed, our furrow spider is a bit more clever than that: their glues are highly effective regardless of the water content of the air, and this humidity-resilience has caught the attention of Saranshu Singla and colleagues at the University of Akron, Ohio.
The furrow spider glue being studied by Singla and co-workers is essentially a cocktail of 3 main components: specialized “glycoproteins” that act as the primary adhesive molecule, a group of smaller low molecular mass compounds (LMMCs), and water. The LMMCs group covers a wide range of chemicals (both organic and inorganic), but the main distinguishing feature of this group is that they are hygroscopic, which means they are water absorbing. The exact recipe of this glue is specific to each spider species, and previous research has shown that individual species’ glues stick best in the climate that spiders evolved in—rather than humidity causing them problems, tropical spider webs are in fact most effective in humid conditions.
To understand how spiders achieve this, the researchers used a combination of spectroscopy [1] techniques to observe the arrangement of molecules during adhesion. They took a densely packed layer of web threads collected from the furrow spider and stuck them to one side of a sapphire prism, an ideal surface for its smoothness and transparency to the light rays used for spectroscopy (See Figure 1 for experimental schematic). They then measured the chemical bonds at the point of contact between the glue droplets and the sticking surface over a range of humidity conditions. These measurements allowed them to figure out what happens when these sticky glues get coated in water.
Singla and her colleagues find that there is very little liquid water at the sticking interface, despite water being one of the three main glue elements. They concluded that the hygroscopic LMMCs are drawing water away from the droplet surface and storing it near the center. The LMMCs make it possible for the sticky glycoproteins to fulfill their role: in high humidity the glue droplet first absorbs nearby water, and then draws that water away from the droplet surface, preventing it from interfering with the sticky molecules’ adhesive chemical bonds. The researchers also conclude that the glue’s efficiency at drawing water to the center of the droplet is controlled by the local humidity and the ratio of the three components. Tweaking this ratio would then make the glue better adapted to different humidities. This suggests that the addition of hygroscopic compounds provides a simple method to tune adhesives to suit specific environments.
This continues to be an exciting time for materials science as scientists unlock the secrets of nature, but perhaps more importantly, Peter Parker can now rest easy with the knowledge that Humidity-Man will be a highly ineffective foe.
1. Broadly, spectroscopy is a study of the interaction between matter and light. There are many different types of spectroscopy, as there are many different ways that light and matter interact, but typically, a beam of light covering a range of the electromagnetic spectrum (hence the “spectro” prefix) is shone onto a substance, and then regathered by a light detector. The brightness of the detected light at each wavelength can then be used to carefully analyze the properties of the substance. Here, the researchers combined infrared spectroscopy and SFG, a non-invasive technique that is specifically tailored to probe molecular arrangements at interfaces, and so is perfectly suited for probing interfacial adhesion.
