Astronauts took spiders to the ISS to see what their webs look like in space and the results were incredible

If you’re scared of spiders, perhaps a career in space might not be for you.

Astronauts recently took spiders up to the International Space Station to try and determine how their webs would be woven without the force of gravity weighing them down.

Spiders tend to build asymmetrical webs with their centre closer to the top of the web than towards the bottom – spiders work with gravity to catch food. But if they don’t have gravity, how do spiders build their webs? These researchers raised a couple of baby spiders to try out this experiment, and sent some up into space while others remained on Earth.

Two spiders were observed for two months while they built webs in zero gravity – they were photographed every five minutes. Their webs and behaviour were compared against the data collected about two spiders on Earth, who served as a control group.

However, while the scientists’ hypothesis was mostly correct, light ended up also serving as a kind of orientation for the spiders. As spiders build mostly asymmetric webs, it was assumed that they would build symmetrical webs, which they did do for the most part.

The paper also points out that this isn’t the first time that such an experiment was attempted on the ISS - in 2008, a spider went missing after it was taken to the ISS, and even flew into a chamber with another spider that had been brought along as a backup.

They essentially flew into each other over and over again, and their food – flies – multiplied far more rapidly than the scientists thought that they originally would. Looks like the ISS is definitely no place for arachnophobes.