Oracle and Open Source

Colophon

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The animals on the cover of Oracle & Open Source are garden spiders. Garden spiders (Areneus diadematus) are orb-spinning garden dwellers. They’re about one to one and three-quarter inches long, generally brownish in color, with a white cross pattern on their abdomen, formed by the guanine crystals they excrete as a waste product.

All spiders are members of the class Arachnida. In mythology, Arachne was a master weaver who, bold and supremely confident of her abilities, challenged the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest. Both wove beautiful, perfect tapestries, but even Minerva had to admit that Arachne’s was superior. In a fit of jealous rage, Minerva destroyed Arachne’s tapestry, and Arachne, humiliated and despondent, tried to hang herself. Minerva turned the rope from which Arachne hung into a web, and Arachne herself into a spider.

The orb web that a garden spider weaves is the quintessential spiderweb, several spokes radiating from a central point, joined by a widening spiral of silk. The silk comes from six spinnerets on the underside of the spider’s body. Each spinneret has hundreds of tiny spigots, each of which in turn is connected to a silk gland that can produce five different types of silk. The output of the spigots ...