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About the Cover
Cover: Spiders depend upon silk fibers throughout their lives to spin webs for prey capture and defense, to lay draglines for locomotion, to wrap prey, and to swaddle their eggs in protective sacs. Orb-weaving spiders such as this silver garden spider Argiope argentata, have evolved a diverse toolkit of five fibrous silks from differentiated glands. Each of these silks possesses distinct material properties that are well-suited to their different ecological functions (see article by T. A. Blackledge and C. Y. Hayashi, pp. 2452-2461). Photograph taken by Bryan Reynolds.
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