“Won’t you come into my parlor?” said the spider to the butterfly. The tricky spider is pretty clever, isn’t he? He knows the fly will be caught and he’ll be able to scamper along and have a nice meal!

But if the sticky web clings to the fly and traps him, why doesn’t it cling to the spider? The answer to this will surprise you. It does! A spider can be just as easily in his own web as a fly is.

The reason this doesn’t happen is that the spider is “at home” in his own web. He knows his way around. And when the web was spun originally, the spider made sure that there would be “safe” threads to use, threads he could touch without sticking to them.

There are many kinds of silk a spider produces. The sticky kind is used in the web to catch prey. But there are also non-sticky threads to make the spokes of its web. The spider knows which is which, and he simply avoids the sticky ones.