Kinda pretty if you don't have to get near them.

:rotflol:

True. But with a spider web, any force on it is going to turn into a tensile force pretty much immediately. To shear a spider web strand, you'd have to have some way to keep the strand pointed one direction while applying force in another. Since the strand is, for all intents and purposes, a 1-dimensional object, it's going to be pulled parallel to your force vector immediately and your force will become purely tensile.

Now that's interesting. Given a force upon a single spider web strand, what is the material that holds it to the tree/brick/wall/branch that it's attached to? And what is that material's tensile strength? If it's knotted and twisted web strands, we're back to the tensile strength issue. If it's something else (glue?), we have a new set of possible failure modes.

Interestingly enough, there are types of steel that are stronger than spider web. Piano wire, for instance. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensile...sile_strengths.

Yes, but we weren't talking about the pictures. Sarasvati48 was questioning my statement;