Thing I learned today: Spiders sometimes consume their webs in order to reuse the protein

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Spider webs come in a range of forms, with some spider webs being used for many years and others being rebuilt each day. The latter often eat their old webs as they dismantle them, but why?

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To recycle the amino acids that make up the silk proteins, some orb-web-spinners ingest the silk as they systematically dismantle their damaged webs. Other species simply discard the old silk but one American species uses it to wrap its egg sac.

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Similar to other spiders, producing the silk needed for webs is energy-intensive. The process is metabolically expensive, and bark spiders require more energy than most other spiders to make their silk strong enough. To compensate for the energy and proteins lost when producing silk, the spiders will eat their old silk to prevent wasting nutrients. This typically happens when the spider wants to build a new web after successfully hunting with one. After getting the most out of their web, they begin to consume the silk, allowing the spider to build a new, strong web quickly without expending excessive energy to synthesize new silk.

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