If you are not a fan of spiders, you may want to skip over today’s Wild Fact. Although, if you love interesting facts about a spider that create webs 10 times stronger than kevlar, keep reading. The Darwin’s Bark Spider is a fairly new species as they were only discovered in 2009 on the naturally diverse island of Madagascar. I am curious how a spider that builds some of the largest webs on the planet went undiscovered for so long. The good news is they have been found and interestingly enough these animals were described exactly 150 years to the date after the publication of Charles Darwin’s famous book, The Origin of Species. In honour of the famous naturalist, current researchers decided to name this fascinating spider after him.

One Large Spider Web

Let’s start with the most interesting aspect of the Darwin’s Bark Spider…their unbelievably large and equally strong spider web. You know how uncomfortable it is when you walk through a normal spider web and you are pulling the threads from your hair, well walking into this spider web would be much worse. It almost scares me to think that you could probably get trapped in this web. The web of this newly discovered spider has a bridge lines reaching over 25 m (82 feet) long and an overall surface area of 2.8 square meters (30 square feet). Even scarier than the size of this web is the fact that if you get caught, it won’t be easy to escape.

The Strongest Biological Material

That’s right, the web of the Darwin’s Bark Spider is the strongest biological material on earth (that we have discovered to date). As mentioned it is roughly 10 times stronger than a piece of kevlar and roughly 2.5 times stronger than other spider webs. I am not sure why this spider has evolved such large, strong webs but I can guarantee you they will provide researchers with hours of enjoyment as we learn everything we can from the properties of their webs. Who knows, it may not be long before Police Officers are wearing bullet-proof vests created from a Darwin’s Bark Spider web.

Darwin’s Bark Spider Fast Fact

With a web this large, you may be wondering just how big this spider is. Unbelievably, the Darwin’s Bark Spider is only about 2 cm (1 inch) in length with the males being smaller than this. I guess these small orb-weaver spiders just like to do great things. It doesn’t matter how small you are…you can always do big things with your life.