An Incisive Design Solution: The Spider's Venomous Fang

Among the factors that make spiders successful predators is the ingeniously composed and structured material of their fangs.

Although their armour consists of the same material as their predator's fangs, flies, grasshoppers and other insects that are the usual prey of spiders have little to offer by way of defence against the spider's bite. As researchers of the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle and the University of Vienna have discovered, the chitin fibres in the fangs of a large Central American wandering spider are arranged and surrounded with proteins in a way that makes the material particularly rigid and thus capable of penetrating its prey's cuticular armour. Thanks to the composition and structure of their materials, the fangs become optimised and reusable hypodermic needles for injecting prey with paralysing venom.....for full story press the link!

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