Electroblemma bifid: A Bizarre ARMORED Spider in Amber From Cenomanian Cretaceous Myanmar

A bizarre armoured spider (Araneae: Tetrablemmidae) from Upper Cretaceous Myanmar amber

Authors:

Selden et al

Abstract:

A new genus and species of tetrablemmid spider, Electroblemma bifida n. gen. et sp., is described, from two adult males found in Upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian) amber of Myanmar. The genus is distinguished by its enormous dorsal carapace projection and highly modified chelicerae. The new genus is referred to the tribe Tetrablemmini within the subfamily Tetrablemminae. The presence of a relatively derived tetrablemmid on the south-east Eurasian continent during the Late Cretaceous suggests that the family was already well diversified in tropical rainforests at this time.

Bolt Threads Successfully Produces Usable Biotech Spider Silk From Yeast

Five years ago, the graduate students behind a secretive startup called Bolt Threads set out to replicate the unique chemical properties of spider silk, an almost magically flexible and durable material that’s in some ways as strong as steel. One of the first things they did was buy a batch of Nephila spiders—the common golden silk orb-weavers—from an insect dealer in Florida. Then they let the spiders spin their webs all over the company’s first office at the University of California at San Francisco. One day a well-known UCSF molecular biologist walked in, saw a spider hanging in a doorway, and ran away screaming.

Scientists, at least those who aren’t arachnophobes, have tried to mass-produce spider silk for decades with little success. Spiders are territorial and cannibalistic—try to farm them, and they end up eating each other. But scientists have long believed that if spiders would only cooperate, fabric made from their silk would be well-suited for use in military and medical equipment, like wound sutures or artificial tendons, as well as in high-performance athletic clothing and other garments.

Bolt Threads has ditched the live spiders but held on to this goal. The company has developed a synthetic alternative to spider silk by engineering proteins identical to the natural threads stretched across the nooks in your basement. It’s raised $40 million from Silicon Valley venture capital firms Foundation Capital, Formation 8, and Founders Fund to commercialize its technology and turn those proteins into fabric. “Over the past few decades, as clothing companies squeezed on price, they’ve taken the innovation out of apparel,” says Dan Widmaier, a graduate of the UCSF Ph.D. program in chemical biology and Bolt’s chief executive officer.

Widmaier and co-founders Ethan Mirsky, Bolt’s vice president for operations, and David Breslauer, its chief scientific officer, are genetically modifying yeast, single-cell organisms that convert simple carbohydrates to proteins through fermentation, and getting them to excrete silk-like proteins. “What would have been done in cells of spiders is now being done by yeast in our lab,” Widmaier says.

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Cretaceous Spider Attack Caught in Amber

The extraordinarily rare fossils are in a piece of amber that preserved this event in remarkable detail, an action that took place in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar in the Early Cretaceous between 97-110 million years ago, almost certainly with dinosaurs wandering nearby.

Aside from showing the first and only fossil evidence of a spider attacking prey in its web, the piece of amber also contains the body of a male spider in the same web. This provides the oldest evidence of social behavior in spiders, which still exists in some species but is fairly rare. Most spiders have solitary, often cannibalistic lives, and males will not hesitate to attack immature species in the same web.

"This juvenile spider was going to make a meal out of a tiny parasitic wasp, but never quite got to it," said George Poinar, Jr., a professor emeritus of zoology at Oregon State University and world expert on insects trapped in amber. He outlined the findings in a new publication in the journal Historical Biology.

"This was a male wasp that suddenly found itself trapped in a spider web," Poinar said. "This was the wasp's worst nightmare, and it never ended. The wasp was watching the spider just as it was about to be attacked, when tree resin flowed over and captured both of them."

Spiders are ancient invertebrates that researchers believe date back some 200 million years, but the oldest fossil evidence ever found of a spider web is only about 130 million years old. An actual attack such as this between a spider and its prey caught in the web has never before been documented as a fossil, the researchers said.