The spiders of Theridiidae's family display a peculiar behaviour when they hunt extremely large prey. They lift the quarry, making it unable to escape, by attaching pre-tensioned silk threads to it. In this work, we analysed for the first time in the laboratory the lifting hunting mechanism and, in order to quantify the phenomenon, we applied the lifting mechanics theory. The comparison between the experiments and the theory suggests that, during the process, spiders do not stretch the silk too much by keeping it in the linear elastic regime. We thus report here further evidence for the strong role of silk in spiders' evolution, especially how spiders can stretch and use it as an external tool to overcome their muscles’ limits and capture prey with large mass, e.g. 50 times the spider's mass.

Theridiidae 家族的蜘蛛在捕食非常大的猎物时表现出一种特殊的行为。他们通过将预先张紧的丝线连接到采石场上，使其无法逃脱。在这项工作中，我们首次在实验室分析了提升摆动机制，为了量化这种现象，我们应用了提升力学理论。实验与理论之间的比较表明，在此过程中，蜘蛛不会通过将丝线保持在线性弹性状态来过度拉伸丝线。因此，我们在此报告了丝绸在蜘蛛进化中的重要作用的进一步证据，特别是蜘蛛如何伸展并将其用作外部工具来克服其肌肉的限制并捕获大质量的猎物，例如蜘蛛质量的 50 倍。