The Itsy-Bitsy Insect Has Made a Web. How Differently Would it Look From Spider Web?

In an alternate Earth, a mass extinction wiped out a percentage of the most successful phylum ever--Arthropoda. All that survived of the class Arachnida were the really small varieties--the ticks, the mites, the pseudoscorpions, the whip spiders and the hooded tickspiders. So who would fill in the niche of Araneae, the true spiders?

In this scenario, that belonged to a group of insects descended from a population of larvae from a species of lacewing that decided to forego their metamorphoses. In time, this one population had evolved into multitudes of orders, families, genera and species. The vast majority of them weave webs for the exact same reason spiders do back home--catching prey. But here's the catch, if you'll pardon the pun--being insects instead of arachnids, their silk does not have the same chemistry. In other words, they don't trap their prey by being sticky.

So in the absence of stickiness, how else can a web made from an insect trap other insects?

posted almost 5 years ago

JohnWDailey‭

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