About a month ago I got my own Foldscope through my university course where we were tasked with creating a blog post on the cool things we’ve viewed under the Foldscope. It was so much fun assembling the Foldscope and I was so fascinated to discover that you can make your own microscope out of paper and some glass that you can carry around with you and view just about anything you find anywhere you want. My first thought for the blog was to go to the beach and find a bluebottle or Portugese man o’ war (Physalia physalis) but unfortunately I didn’t find one.
 
The next best thing was to google some cool things to look at under a microscope and the thing that caught my eye was a spiderweb. Lucky for me, I have a little buddy that lives in the corner of my balcony near the rain pipe so I stole a little bit of his home to view.

The strings of silk caught a bit of dirt and debris so there are a couple random things in among the webs.



Interestingly you can see the ends almost appear pointed or hooked. This is what normally catches the insects legs as the webs act like velcro to trap insects.


You can see some of the sticky silk strings have caught on dust particles.


Looking a bit closer, you can actually see the fibres the silk is made out of. Spider silk is mainly composed of two proteins: Spidoroin I and II. These are block copolymers which you can see by the rectangular shapes. These copolymer proteins create strong crosslinks that reinforce the polymer network and give spider silk its incredible tensile strength.

Looking forward to exploring more of the Foldverse with my trusty Foldscope!