Spider Web Construction in Slow Motion

Spiders are incredible engineers. This is a slow motion and normal speed closeup movie of a common garden spider building a web. I thought the webbuilding process was amazing before I grabbed my camerabut even more so after I slowed down the footage to 10 of normal speed So fast and efficient is this spider as it extracts silk from its abdomen, shifts its grip on the silk fibers from claw to claw, measures distances, and creates just the right amount of tension to keep the web taut. And the third leg from the front on the spider s left side appears to be missing it s foot Of great interest to me was how the spider attached the silk fiber at each junction. After a little research on How Things Work at I learned that spiders make both sticky and nonsticky silk fibers when constructing a web. The nonsticky silk fibers are the radial fibers going from the center of the web to the outside edges. The sticky cross beam fibers are the ones that are being c