Spider silk: Sticky when wet

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.

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Figure 1. A spider unperturbed by the water droplets formed on its sticky web.

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.

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Figure 2. Experimental setup schematic from the manuscript. The white scale bar in c is 0.1 mm. Here “flagelliform” refers to the silk material prior to the glue layer being added, and “BOAS” refers to the classic beads-on-a-string structure that droplets form on threads. SFG stands for “sum frequency generation” spectroscopy, the noninvasive technique used in this research for analyzing the molecular arrangement at the sticking interface between the glue droplets and the sapphire surface.

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.

Are squid the key to invisibility?

Original paper: Adaptive infrared-reflecting systems inspired by cephalopods


While many today would associate a “cloak of invisibility” with Harry Potter, the idea of a magical item that renders the wearer invisible is not a new one. In Ancient Greek, Hades was gifted a cap of invisibility in order to overthrow the Titans, whereas, in Japanese folklore, Momotar? loots a straw-cloak of invisibility from an ogre, a story which is strangely similar to the English fairytale Jack the Giant-Slayer. Looking to the future in Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry imagined a terrible foe known as the Klingons, a war-driven race that could appear at any moment from behind their cloaking devices – indeed, any modern military would bite your arm off to get hold of this kind of device. Clearly, invisibility is a concept that has captured minds across many cultures, genres, and eras, so it should be no wonder that scientists are working on making it a reality.

As is often the case in materials science, a good starting point for inspiration is to look to biology, after all, life has had billions of years of competition-driven evolution to craft its tools. To that end, Gorodetsky and his team at of the University of California, Irvine, have been attempting to replicate the master of disguise: the cephalopod. From this class of mollusk, squid and octopuses in particular excel at adaptively altering the color, texture, and patterning of their skin to camouflage against a wide variety of oceanic backdrops (see Figure 1). They accomplish this primarily by stretching and contracting pigment-containing skin cells. More importantly to this research, some species of squid have additional skin cells called ‘iridocytes’, which are structured reflective cells that resemble a microscopic comb or folded pleats. These folds reflect light at specific wavelengths that correspond to the fold size. By actively stretching and contracting these cells on-demand, the squid effectively becomes a self-modifying bioelectronic display.

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Figure 1: Squid before (left) and after (right) deploying camouflage. Images reproduced from
a video by H. Steenfeldt under the YouTube Creative Commons Attribution license.

Following this technique of stretch-induced camouflage, the authors devise a technique for replicating some squid-like properties in an artificial material. The procedure consists of using electron-beam evaporation[1] to deposit an aluminum layer onto a stretched polymer film held under strain. When they release the strain, the metallically coated material shrinks and buckles to form microscopic wrinkles that are analogous to the structures in squid iridocyte cells. The polymer film of choice is an excellent proton conductor, so when mounted to electrodes, it can be stretched back to the flat state simply by applying a voltage.

When stretched, the aluminum coated film will reflect infrared light like a perfect mirror, whereas when wrinkled, the incoming light is reflected diffusively in multiple directions, like sunlight hitting the moon. To see this effect, the scientists shine infrared light – a heat source – at the material and position an infrared camera at a specific angle so that when flat, it reflects all the incoming radiation toward the camera and appears hot; when relaxed and wrinkled, much less of the light is scattered towards the camera, making the material appears to take on the thermal properties of the background and disappear from view.

Perhaps as a head-nod to their biological inspiration, the team then recreate this material in the likeness of a squid and watch as its infrared silhouette disappears from the camera’s view (Figure 2).

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Figure 2: The flexible squid-shaped material, viewed under an infrared camera. When relaxed (left), very little infrared is reflected towards the camera, and it appears cold. When stretched (right), it reflects most incoming infrared light towards the camera and appears hot. Image edited from Fig. 5 in the manuscript.

The authors conclude that this ready-for-manufacturing material will have immediate applications in heat-regulating technology, and while it is currently limited to the infrared part of the spectrum, they also note that there is no reason why this technique couldn’t be adapted to the optical range.

Squid haven’t solved our desires for a cloak of invisibility just yet, but these mysterious creatures may hold more secrets than we realize. We would be wise to keep an eye on them … if we can.


[1]  Electron beam evaporation is the technique of bombarding a solid metal with energetic electrons, causing it to evaporate. This metal vapor then cools and condenses uniformly on all nearby surfaces, forming a uniform metallic coating.