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A study of spider webs of southern and central Yunnan, China, has shown that the sticky webs do a good job in capturing and hanging onto pollen grains from local plants. Scientists say the method may be useful in plant surveys worldwide. "The type of pollen and spores identified from the spider webs can reflect the vegetation of the sampling site," said Cheng-Sen Li of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Beijing Museum of Natural History. Along with colleagues from China, India and England, Li has published a paper on their discovery in the July issue of the journal Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology. As part of their study, Li and his colleagues collected the largest webs the team could find, without regard to the species of spider involved. They also appeared to be abandoned webs, Li said. "We do not know whether the species of spider is important or not for such work, as we did not find the spider when we collected the web samples. So at least for this initial study, the important thing was that there were just any web-building spiders at all," Li said. After collecting the webs across a swath of countryside, the team then returned to their labs and dissolved the webs away. They then took stock of the pollen and spores that remained. For the most part, the web pollen reflected the plants found in the collection areas. Strangely, however, the only thing missing in the webs were spores from ferns and mosses. "It’s not exactly clear why that is, since the wind can easily carry spores. One possibility is the specific spots we found their webs," said Li. "The webs we collected were mostly from the small trees and shrubs. While the ferns and mosses were living on the wet ground, their spores were transported mostly by water on the ground. So at least in this case, it’s possible that there weren’t many spores of ferns and mosses in the air at the time," Li said. "In other words,
where such spores are more abundant, there’s no reason to think
spider webs won’t be pretty good at catching them too,"
Discovery News quoted Li as saying. —ANI
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