Why
do spiders have so many legs (besides giving us the creeps)? Alain
Pasquet and colleagues noticed that more than 1 in 10 spiders caught in
the wild are missing one of their eight legs, so they decided to see
whether spiders with fewer limbs suffer any disadvantage when it comes
to spinning webs:
Based on the findings, the authors propose that
spiders have legs that they don’t really need—an advantage when it comes
to escaping a predator that’s put the bite on a limb, for example.
Yet there does appear to be a limit to how many legs a spider can
lose. In the wild, the team found few spiders missing more than two
legs. And in the lab, these five-legged spiders built shoddy webs.
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