Spider silk is a bit like a cross between steel and rubber.
Mai Lam/The Conversation NY-BD-CC
Some spiders produce silk than can actually be stronger than steel and 50 times as light.
Halloween spiders.
Flickr/Scott McLeod
There are plenty of reasons to love and not hate spiders, but let’s start with just eight.
Tobias Wrzal / Flickr
If we could mimic spider silk, it could revolutionise the fibres we use on a daily basis.
Hang on, is that a spider floating this way?
Andrea Izzotti/shutterstock
The closest relative of Kangaroo Island’s trapdoor spider lives in South Africa - and the arachnid could have arrived in Australia by oceanic migration.
The last thing the spider saw before everything went black.
Flickr/Nicola Albertini
If a huge huntsman spider is sucked into a vacuum cleaner, can it crawl out later? Lucy, age eight, really, really needs to know.
If it’s good enough for a spider, why can’t we make such strong silk?
Flickr/Petra Bensted
Spider silk is strong stuff and could be used to manufacture ultra tough ropes and cables, and better sutures in medicine. If only we could find a way to make the stuff.
Just another of Australia’s creepy crawlies… but will it kill you?
Flickr/
Australia’s snakes, spiders and other venomous critters tend to strike fear in many people. But is Australia’s reputation as a nation of deadly creatures deserved?
Dr. Tanya Pennell
New research into how wasps divide up their jobs shows how economics can be key to understanding animal behaviour.
Avoiding celebrities.
Shutterstock
I’m an edible invertebrate … get me away from there.
Shield bug guarding her eggs in the Ecuadorean rainforest.
Andreas Kay/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The perils of bug parenting.
Texas blind salamander.
John Perry/Flickr
A new project hopes to drill through the Earth’s crust for the first time. But what beasties lurk deep beneath our feet?
The social huntsman, Delena cancerides , can be found in families of up to 150.
Linda S. Rayor
Huntsman spiders deserve a place alongside koalas and kangaroos as iconic Australian wildlife.
Spider silk is just one of the ways nature has inspired innovation.
Silk image from www.shutterstock.com
Drugs, new materials and even more creative uses: biodiversity is full of potential.
Latrodectus hasseltii, the redback spider.
Toby Hudson/Wikimedia Commons
Be thankful you aren’t a male redback spider.
Fungus gnats are one the many arthropods that find their way into our homes.
Gnat image from www.shutterstock.com
Our homes harbour hundreds of species of insects and their relatives.
Is Australia really the most lethal nation on earth when it comes down to it?
The Conversation
There’s a simple reason why Australia isn’t the most lethal nation in the world.
As a generalist predator, spiders, like this Western Rough Wolf Spider, help limit the number of insects in your garden.
Jean and Fred/Flickr
Only two Australian spiders can kill you, but the rest are a pretty fascinating bunch.
Look at me! They’re not called peacock spiders for nothing.
Maddie Girard
Biologists, along with most of the internet, have been puzzled as to why peacock spiders have such flamboyant courtship displays. So we decided to find out.
Spiders such as this funnel-web (Hadronyche infensa) will only bite if threatened.
There are more than 45,000 species of spider, but only a handful are potentially dangerous to humans.
The wasp’s pupa commandeering an enslaved spider.
Keizo Takasuka
Scientists in Japan have discovered a new species of wasp that induces a zombie-like state in spiders in order to manipulate them into protecting the wasp’s own offspring.