RE: Spider Webs Developed Once, In The Cretaceous

[gerarus@westnet.com.au]

>Researchers led by Jessica Garb of the University of California, 
>Riverside, compared orb-web building spiders in the genuses
>Deinopoidea 
>and Araneoidea.

That's superfamilies, of course, not genera. Probably hundreds of
genera are involved.
Interestingly, the orb-web has been lost in a number of araneoid
lineages - the various lineages of micro-spiders (Symphytognathidae,
Anapidae, etc.) generally build less organised sheet webs, while the
bird-dung spiders (_Celaenia_ and allies in Araneidae) have lost the
web or reduced it to a single hanging line, and catch the moths they
feed on by emitting the same pheromones as released by the female
moth, then grabbing the males that come looking.

    Cheers,

        Christopher Taylor