Aptly nicknamed the “bone collector,” the larva haunts a six-square-mile patch of Oahu’s Wai‘anae Mountains, lurking exclusively in spider webs and disguising itself in the corpses of its ...

According to new research published last week in Current Biology, a North American spider species can change how its webs transmit vibrations. The authors have reported that spiders in urban ...

Spiders are known to learn about predators, prey, potential mates, and their overall environment from vibrations carried by their webs. Funnel-weaving spiders in particular connect their webs to ...

The new study, conducted by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, shows the webs of funnel-weaving spiders transmit vibrations differently in response to increased local noise.

A newly described species from Hawaiʻi hides itself with carcasses to avoid getting eaten by spiders. Newly described bone collector caterpillars build a silken case around their bodies and adorn ...

Here, Daniel Rubinoff and colleagues describe a newly discovered Hawai'ian predatory caterpillar species –the "bone collector" – which lives exclusively within spider webs tucked into tree hollows and ...

(Rubinoff et al., Science, 2025) In the wild, a bone collector caterpillar will find an enclosed spider web – one that's safely concealed under tree bark, for example – and collect inedible pieces of ...