Figure 3.

Material law variation and impact on web mechanics. (a) Six material laws were used to model capture spiral threads in the web in order to characterize the effect of extensibility-for-strength exchange observed in spider capture silk (shown in black). Radial silk material behaviour exhibited little variation across species and was consequently kept consistent across the models. The dotted green line represents the atomistically derived material behaviour of dragline silk radial threads [44]. The spread of maximum stress and strain values for capture silk is based on the observed silk material variation across spider species (figure 1). An exponential material law was fit to tensile experiments [20], and kept consistent for all models. The web was parametrized accordingly for the six different spiral thread material laws, and deformation was applied as shown in figure 2a. (b) Snapshots of the web corresponding to two extreme cases (labelled i, ii in (a)).