Araneoid  Spiders  -  Superfamily:   Araneoidea
"The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web."
Edwin Waye Teale.  (1899 - 1980)
     Araneoid Spiders can be found on every continent except Antarctica.  They are a very large, colourful and richly varied superfamily that is dividided into twenty families and as of 2023 contains  12,971 species in 1,185 genera.  That is 25.2 per cent of all described species of spiders.  The sheer size of this superfamily does suggest though that relationships between families as it stands at present may well be called into question following further studies. This despite the fact that there appears to be consensus amongst the experts about the circumscription of this oversized superfamily.
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      Araneoid spiders evolved from orbweb building ancestors. These spiders are sometimes referred to as “araneoid sheetweavers” due to their web-building behavior. Their webs are evolutionarily derived from sheetwebs without gumfeet*, which were built by Linyphiids.   
      Spiders have been evolving for at least 380 million years. The group’s origins lie within an arachnid sub-group defined by the presence of book lungs. Spiders with spinnerets at the end of the abdomen, which include Mygalomorphae and Araneomorphae, appeared more than 250 million years ago.
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       Recently some beautiful spider fossils were found in N.S.W., Australia that are certain to shed more light on spider evolution.   A large brush-footed trapdoor spider and a small jumping spider from the Miocene between 11 and 16 million years ago show how different arachnids responded to rapidly changing climate. The brush-footed spider (Megamonodontium mccluskyi) was about 1 centimetre long and is currently the second-largest spider fossil ever found.    The jumping spider is visible from the dorsal (top) side and hasn’t been distorted during fossilisation and it shows remarkable detail. It is about 2.5 mm long with a short, rounded cephalothorax. The large lenses of its two front eyes are visible, surrounded by short setae (stiff hairs). There is one fang and most of its legs are visible, including joints and setae.   (See links below for more.)
*      Gumfooted webs are a type of spider web. They are named for the sticky silk lines, or “gumfooted lines”, that spiders lay down in a crisscross pattern close to the ground. These lines are attached to the ground on one end and to the main part of the web on the other. When an insect walks into these lines, it gets stuck and the line detaches from the ground, causing the prey to spring up into the air and become more entangled in the web. This type of web is often built by spiders in the Theridiidae  family, which includes well-known species like the Redback Spider.
      Edwin Way Teale  (see the quote at the top of the page)  was an American naturalist, photographer, and author who wrote nature books that were illustrated with his own photographs. In 1966 he received a Pulitzer Prize for the book Wandering Through Winter (1965), in which he records the flora and fauna encountered while traveling some thirty-odd thousand  kilometers through the United States in the winter.
References  and  links:

^      Sahni, V., Harris, J., Blackledge, T. et al.   'Cobweb-weaving spiders produce different attachment discs for locomotion and prey capture.'   Nat Commun 3, 1106 (2012). 

​​         https://australian.museum/learn/animals/spiders/spider-webs/
         https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Articles/2023/September/fossil-jumping-spider
       https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2099
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_lung
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumscription_(taxonomy)
         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miocene
       https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2018.0193
       https://www.sciencefriday.com/educational-resources/spider-web-force-and-energy/​
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Header   photo:
​Erik Beringen.
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