Like strings on a guitar, spider silks can vibrate along a wide range of frequencies, transmitting information about prey, other spiders and even the condition of the web itself, researchers say.

Spiders have bad eyesight and are known to rely on the vibrations of their webs to alert them to the presence of captives. To discover more about the vibrations, British scientists fired lasers and bullets at individual spider strings and used ultra-high-speed cameras to record the results. They found that the strings vibrated across a wider range of harmonics compared with other materials, and that the type of vibration varied with the type of impact and the quality of the individual silk.

The vibrations help a spider determine what sort of prey has landed in its web, the researchers concluded. Spiders can also produce different kinds of silk depending on their needs, essentially “tuning” their webs to the environment and hunting conditions. Their study was published in the journal Advanced Materials.

“Spider silks are unique in that the spider can choose what the properties are,” said Beth Mortimer, an arachnologist at Oxford University and the lead researcher on the study. “It allows the spider to have a toolbox that can respond to different humidity conditions or to availability of different types of prey.”