Dakota Piorkowski

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Scientist at L'Oréal

Spider silk is a promising material with great potential in biomedical applications due to its incredible mechanical properties and resistance to degradation of commercially available bacterial strains. However, little is known about the bacterial communities that may inhabit spider webs and how these microorganisms interact with spider silk. In th...

Spider silk is a promising material with great potential in biomedical applications due to its incredible mechanical properties and resistance to bacterial degradation, particularly commercially available strains. However, little is known about the bacterial communities that may inhabit spider webs and how these microorganisms interact with spider...

Visual prey luring in animals is typically achieved by brightly colored body parts or excretions of the signal sender, and using signals from other organisms is rarely reported. However, certain species of kleptoparasitic Argyrodes spiders usually reside in the webs of Cyrtophora spiders, and their brightly colored bodies have been demonstrated to...

Adhesive materials used by many arthropods for biological functions incorporate sticky substances and a supporting material that operate synergistically by exploiting substrate attachment and energy dissipation. While there has been much focus on the composition and properties of the sticky glues of these bio-composites, less attention has been giv...

Most spiders use major ampullate silk (MAS) to perform many functions across their lifetimes, including prey capture, vibratory signal detection, and safety/dragline. To accommodate their various needs, adult spiders can use inducible variability to tailor MAS with specific mechanical properties. However, it is currently unknown whether this induci...

Adhesive snares built from silks are fascinating adaptations that have rarely evolved outside spiders. Glowworms (Arachnocampa spp.) are an iconic part of the fauna of Australia and New Zealand that combine the construction of a sticky snare with a bioluminescent lure. Recently, the structure and biomechanical properties of glowworm silk have been...

- the article can be downloaded using this link for the next 50 days: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1c54n6EHNeeZxY - The disruptive nature of water presents a significant challenge when designing synthetic adhesives that maintain functionality in wet conditions. However, many animal adhesives can withstand high humidity or underwater conditions, a...

Spider major ampullate (MA) silk, with its combination of strength and extensibility, outperforms any synthetic equivalents. There is thus much interest in understanding its underlying materiome. While the expression of the different silk proteins (spidroins) appears an integral component of silk performance, our understanding of the nature of the...

Composites, both natural and synthetic, achieve novel functionality by combining two or more constituent materials. For example, the earliest adhesive silk in spider webs – cribellate silk – is composed of stiff axial fibers and coiled fibers surrounded by hundreds of sticky cribellate nanofibrils. Yet little is known of how fiber types interact to...

Spider silks are protein-based fibers that are incorporated into webs with the unique combination of high mechanical toughness and resistance to microbial degradation. While spiders are undoubtedly exposed to saprophytic microorganisms in their native habitats, such as the forest understory and bush, their silks have rarely been observed to decompo...

Web-building spiders are an extremely diverse predatory group due to their use of physiologically differentiated silk types in webs. Major shifts in silk functional properties are classically attributed to innovations in silk genes and protein expression. Here, we disentangle the effects of spinning behavior on silk performance of the earliest type...

Bioluminescent glow-worms (Arachnocampa spp.) capture prey in glue-coated silk capture threads hung from their nests on damp cave and wet forest substrates. In a dry environment, these animals are very susceptible to desiccation as their bodies can become life threateningly dry and their silk has been anecdotally observed to become non-sticky. Wate...

Visual signals are widely used by animals in foraging, mating and predator avoidance. Body coloration plays an important role in the reproductive behavioural interactions of many diurnal animal species; however, its role in the courtship of nocturnal species has received little attention. We investigated the role of conspicuous body coloration, a w...

Animal morphological traits may vary across life stages. Web‐building spiders are diverse insectivores that can display ontogenetic shifts in the design and properties of their webs. Nevertheless, we know little about how a critical component of their webs, major ampullate silk (MAS), varies in property across life stages, inferably owing to a diff...

Animals that use deceptive visual signals to attract prey often employ colour mimicry or bioluminescence but less commonly self-excreted lures. The conspicuous web decorations and silks of some web-building spiders have been shown to visually lure prey in the daytime. However, it remains unknown whether spider webs can also lure prey at night with...

The origin of viscid capture silk in orb webs, from cribellate silk-spinning ancestors, is a key innovation correlated with significant diversification of web-building spiders. Ancestral cribellate silk consists of dry nanofibrils surrounding a stiff, axial fiber that adheres to prey through van der Waals interactions, capillary forces, and physica...

While molting occurs in the development of many animals especially in arthropods, post-maturity molting (PMM, organisms continue to molt after sexual maturity) has received little attention. Mechanism of molting has been studied intensively, however, the mechanism of PMM remains unknown although it is suggested to be crucial for the development of...

Body coloration has been known to play an important role in animal visual communication. Attraction of prey by visual signals, such as bright body coloration, has been mainly observed in diurnal predators. For nocturnal cursorial predators, however, this foraging tactic has been largely ignored, because one would not expect it to occur under low am...

Predators exhibit flexible foraging to facilitate taking prey that offer important nutrients. Because trap-building predators have limited control over the prey they encounter, differential nutrient extraction and trap architectural flexibility may be used as a means of prey selection. Here, we tested whether differential nutrient extraction induce...

The role of background matching in camouflage has been extensively studied. However, contour modification has received far less attention, especially in twig-mimicking species. Here, we studied this deceptive strategy by revealing a special masquerade tactic, in which the animals protract and cluster their legs linearly in the same axis with their...