Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive

Webs and their weavers

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Description Many people fear all spiders to such an extent that they have never explored this interesting world of living things. Only a few spiders are harmful to human beings, and the other thousands of kinds are often shunned because of these. Here is a new insight into the spider, a creature with eight eyes, glands to produce several kinds of silk, and instinctual knowledge to build snares so complicated and beautiful that man has to admire their design and efficiency. On beautiful film, taken by Charles Walcott, you’ll see Charlotte, (Aranea cavatics, the barn spider that EB White wrote about in Charlotte’s Web) spin her web and catch prey. Other film sequences will show how a funnel-web spider uses her sheet web, and how a crab spider, camouflaged like a flower, needs no web at all but awaits his victim on a plant.

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