A Truly Remarkable Spider
The spider <em>Hyptiotes</em> reinvented the concept of the web, building an extraordinary, spring-loaded trap.
Almost 150 years ago, on an October afternoon, Burt Green Wilder was strolling through the woods outside Ithaca, when he stumbled across a strange spider web attached to a hemlock branch. It was triangular, as if a wedge had been cut from a full web. And “instead of hanging loosely from the twigs, it was upon the stretch, as if constantly drawn by a power at one or the other end,” Wilder later wrote.
Wilder had many talents: He was a Civil War surgeon, a pioneering neuroscientist famous for his vast that included, eventually, his own, and a zoologist whose fondness for spiders led him to that milked them for
