Spiders, silks and webs are abundant and can be found in most ecosystems: in the corner of houses, on top of bushes, or even spanning rivers. They are the proof of an evolutionary success as they were able to survive and prosper for millions of years despite being subjected to environmental and human threats, such as the displacement of spider web silk attachments or impact of prey, predators, and debris. Their success is in part due to the excellent mechanical properties of silk and webs that originate from their hierarchical structure of silk, ranging from silk protein, to fibers, to spider webs. Here, we investigate the mechanical behavior of highly complex Cyrtophora Citricola 3D spider web, the architecture of which has been digitally modeled with micron-scale details from images of full-scale laboratory experiments, under stretching and projectile impact, using coarse-grain bead-spring simulations. We show that the interplay between the nonlinear behavior of spider silk and the redundancy of complex 3D spider web structures is crucial for the robustness and resilience of spider webs. The tangle region of the spider web allows prey to fly through and be caught in the dense tent web region, providing food to the spider. It also filters out predators at low impact velocity, and consequently protects the spider located in the tent region. Understanding the role of the interplay between silk mechanics and 3D web structure in webs’ evolutionary fitness could lead to high-performance and lightweight fiber network composite for structural, material and biomedical engineering.

蜘蛛，丝绸和网布非常丰富，可以在大多数生态系统中找到：在房屋的一角，灌木丛上，甚至横跨河流。它们经受住了环境和人类的威胁，例如蜘蛛网丝附件的移位或猎物，掠食者和残骸的撞击，仍然能够生存和繁荣数百万年，因此它们是进化上成功的证明。它们的成功部分归功于丝绸和纤维网的出色机械性能，这些机械性能源于其丝绸的层次结构，从丝绸蛋白到纤维，再到蜘蛛网。在这里，我们研究高度复杂的Cyrtophora Citricola的力学行为3D蜘蛛网，在拉伸和弹丸冲击下，通过使用粗粒珠弹簧模拟，从完整规模的实验室实验图像中以微米级细节对数字化的体系结构进行了数字建模。我们表明，蜘蛛丝的非线性行为与复杂3D蜘蛛网结构的冗余之间的相互作用对于蜘蛛网的鲁棒性和弹性至关重要。蜘蛛网的缠结区域使猎物飞过并被密密的帐篷网区域捕获，为蜘蛛提供食物。它还以低的撞击速度过滤掉捕食者，从而保护位于帐篷区域的蜘蛛。