Heads up! The #MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024 call opens in April. 🔍 Start your journey early by exploring potential host organisations now and gear up to craft the perfect proposal! 🌟 🎓🔬 More info and opportunities this way ➡️ europa.eu/!KJ8XY7

#Spiders, remote #Islands, #Antarctica, #evolution and long-range #dispersal: our new paper pre-published in @ASNAmNat has it all: doi.org/10.1086/730827 Phylogeography of Southern Seashore Spiders EVO|MEC, Krehenwinkel lab, @CeridwenFraser, Shahan Derkarabetian, David Renault etal.

Trapdoor spider (Ummidia algarve) not being happy that I opened the lid of its retreat.

Having a great time researching #spider, #spidersilk and #spiderweb in Portugal. 🤩🕷🕸🇵🇹

Had a nice day visit to the field station Herdade da Ribeira Abaixo (CE3C) where everything was in flowers 🌼. Thanks Pedro Cardoso cardosopmb.bsky.social for showing us around and pointing out the interesting spider habitats.

Great weekend at CE3C field station. A total of 15 arachnologists gathered to sample #spiders for different projects. Inventorying the local fauna kickstarting the #BASS project and looking for some species for studies on the evolution of #silk. Further plans ahead.

Visiting a hidden cave with Marc Domènech to sample silks from the enigmatic Telema spiders was a great finale of our Iberian field trip.

Just returned from our #NoFly fieldtrip to Portugal and Catalonia. We tested what is feasible: by opting to travel by #rail from Greifswald to Seville (~3,000km) we cut the CO2 foot print of our fielwork to ~0.3t vs over 2t by flying.

On our expedition to Borneo, we spotted an Amulius assassin bug that weaponises tree resin. It coats its fore legs in it, and when a termite walks past, it gives it a sticky -- and deadly -- embrace and sucks out the prey's insides. 📷 Clister Pangantihon

The threads spun by the Southern house spider (Kukulcania) to capture prey are the most extensible fibre material found in nature due to a special loops-on-loops structure with regularly coiled fibres held together by straight connecting fibres. 👉 doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2… 👈🔓

Spiders are masters in silk spinning and possess multiple different silk glands that produce fibres or glues with different properties. Which gland is used for what - web, egg case, dispersal ...? In a new preprint we give a summary on methods to find out: doi.org/10.32942/X2CP7K

Nature’s aquatic architects: Caddisfly larvae use specially adapted silk to construct portable cases and underwater shelters that provide protection and facilitate feeding. New #ProcB paper explores the evolutionary origins of this trait: ow.ly/srZE50SusUJ paul frandsen

It was a great pleasure to host Evolutionary Biomechanics Laboratory David Labonte for a few days. We enjoyed inspiring discussions about arthropod biomechanics and generated new ideas.

👀👀Jonas Wolff invited me to join him in writing a dispatch on the beautiful work on eye evolution in spiders🕷️by Kaylin Chong, Lauren Sumner-Rooney and co-authors recently published in Current Biology. This was a total pleasure to write!👀👀 doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.…

Did someone ever ask you why should we care about #spiders? Or maybe you wondered yourself? In doi.org/10.22541/au.17… we delve into the diverse spectrum of spider #ecosystem #services and their potential to inspire #nature-based #solutions. Figure by @jago_MO CE3C