Check out this spiny-backed spider's snazzy silk glands, magnified 490 times. Image credit: Dennis Kunkel/arXiv Gossamer spiders are best known for their bizarre "ballooning" stunts, but it's only this week that we've learned how they pull them off. They disperse by spinning strands of silk into the open air, which allowsthem to float through the atmosphere miles above the surface of the earth and out to sea far beyond the reach of land. These 8-legged kites can apparently survive 25 days without food during their aeronautical journeys. Even Darwin was baffled by their methods---as he wrote in his diary on October 31, 1832, from his ship off the coast of Argentina,
"In the evening all the ropes were coated & fringed with Gossamer web. I caught some of the aeronaut spiders, which must have come at least 60 miles: How inexplicable is the cause which induces these small insects, as ...
