Mr. Benjamin Snowdon Profile

Benjamin Snowdon

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Proceedings Article | 30 December 2019 Paper

Orb web spider silks: how their optics affects potential visibility

Deb Kane, Benjamin Snowdon, Sean Blamires, Douglas Little

Proceedings Volume 11200, 112000R (2019) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2541128

KEYWORDS: Profiling, Light scattering, Refractive index, Reflectivity, Ultraviolet radiation, Visible radiation

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Certain spider silks, as used in aerial orb webs, are high quality optical micro-fibers with widths of 1 to a few microns and a refractive index of ~1.55. It has been reported that such silks have reduced relative reflectance in the ultra-violet and violet, as compared to the rest of the visible light spectrum with implications for their visibility to insect vision. Relative reflectance as a function of wavelength gives no insight into the fraction of the intensity of light that falls on a spider silk that will be backscattered/reflected into a solid angle such that it might result in it being visible to an oncoming insect, for example. We will report comparative results from measurements of the radial silks of four orb web weaving spider species. These species evolved at different times and/or to exploit different biological habits. One species is nocturnal. Combining the results of photoreflectance measurements and optical surface profiling studies shows how the geometry of the spider silks may have evolved to reduce the scattered/reflected light from the radial silk of certain species. The properties of certain spider silks as an optical material with low UV absorption also emerge from this study.

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