Leslie Brunetta

The authors of Spider Silk can’t quite figure out what their intended audience is, and it’s unfortunate. About half the book is a rather elementary account of evolutionary theory – high school biology level, perhaps, although it’s been a long time since I’ve been in high school so I’m not quite sure what they’re teaching nowadays. This was pretty boring; it’s done better elsewhere, and I didn’t really need to be reminded over and over that tiny changes in the proteins that make up spider silk can cause large changes in the material properties.


However, the discussion of spider taxonomy and paleontology was pretty interesting; I’m supposed to be a invertebrate paleontologist and yet had managed to miss out on a number of important developments – the importance and abundance of Paleozoic trignotarbids; Attercopus and Permarachne, both originally supposed to be ancestral spiders yet turning out to be something else entirely; the number of species of mesothelid spiders; and the importance of major ampullate silk in the spider evolution (this is the ultra-strong stuff that allows insect-catching webs and escape lines; mesothelids and mygalomorphs can’t make it). Even here, though, the authors (or, more likely, the editor) talk down to the reader with the gratingly annoying habit of believing binomial nomenclature is too complicated and thus using “common” names. Therefore the text is full of abominations like “the twig-like feather-legged spider” (Miagrammopes sp.) and “spherical minute clasping weaver spider” (I can’t even find a binomial name for that one, which makes the “common” name useless). Of course, they can’t do this all the time because there are plenty of spiders – in fact, almost all of them – that don’t have “common” names; thus one section will discuss Portia fimbriata with aplomb while the next is full of “spherical minute clasping weaver spiders”. I suspect an editor with “find and replace”.


Enough interesting stuff to be worth reading; the arachnologist of the author pair, Catherine Craig, has a scientific monograph on spider silk that may be more to my taste. Good drawings and photographs, and an extensive bibliography.… (meer)