Catley's web
Professor has a passion for spiders
Archived article from Jan 28, 2000
By Ruby Keise
Not since the most famous spider in literature spun her message "Some Pig" in E. B. White's classic children's story "Charlotte's Web" has anyone paid quite so much attention to the wonderful properties of these intricate fly traps. Last fall, however, Kefyn Catley kept a roomful of NASA scientists spellbound with a discussion of the extraordinary properties of spider silk.
Catley, an assistant professor of science education at the Graduate School of Education (GSE), has always had a passion for spiders. "Spiders are fascinating for all sorts of reasons," he points out. "As a child I was always fascinated by bugs, and when I got older and realized I wanted to pursue science, I could have studied beetles or moths or a number of other things. I just happened to study spiders because they can teach you so much from their behavior."
They also, he discovered, have something valuable to teach scientists, especially those looking for strong, elastic fibers. That's how Catley found himself addressing researchers in NASA's Gossamer Spacecraft Initiative, which is charged with building ultralightweight structures for use in space, where lightness and strength are at a premium.
Spider silk, he told the NASA audience, has a tenacity slightly less than nylon but is twice as elastic, with a tensile strength superior to rubber or bone. "It has to be 40 miles long before it breaks under its own weight," he reports. And spiders work swiftly. Their light, translucent webs can be woven in less than half an hour in zero gravity.
"Spiders have been around for more than 350 million years and if they haven't gotten it right by now, presumably they never will," he quips. "If you really want to learn how to build an incredibly light structure that's also incredibly strong, then this is an excellent place to start the research."
As Catley discoursed on optical properties, molecular structure, adhesive features and web architecture during the three-day workshop held in Oxnard, Calif., he made it clear just how complicated it will be for scientists to synthesize spider silk. "What you guys have been asked to do in a few generations, spiders have been doing for a long, long time," Catley told the space experts.
Catley, who joined GSE in September, has spent 15 years studying spiders and biodiversity throughout South America, Australia, Europe and North America. A native Welshman, he came to the United States in 1989, and from 1996 to 1999 he split his time between the department of entomology and the National Center for Science Literacy, Education and Technology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
In some ways it was an ideal arrangement, since it allowed him to combine his scientific research with his keen interest in education. He's particularly interested in finding ways to integrate field studies into scientific curricula.
In 1998, for instance, he turned a scientific expedition sponsored by the museum and the Discovery Channel Online into a learning opportunity for teachers and students around the globe. The expedition's four-person team covered thousands of miles of deserts and beaches in Western Australia, hunting ground spiders in a particularly fertile region believed to have three times as many spider species as can be found in the whole United States. Catley estimates that although there are already 36,000 known species of spiders globally, 80 percent of Australia's spiders have yet to be described.
The monthlong expedition was documented by the Discovery Channel, which produced educational programs, a Web site with daily updates, an online "In Your Own Backyard" guide to finding spiders at home and even a "Name That Spider" contest to draw both young and old viewers into the world of arachnology.
"We found nearly everything we came for, which is unusual," Catley told Discovery. His only disappointment: He didn't get to see a death adder, one of Australia's highly venomous snakes.
It's that enthusiasm for conveying insights into the natural world that made Catley so attractive to Rutgers. And Catley, who started his professional life as a K-12 teacher, was ready to bring New Jersey teachers a host of new ideas for making science come alive in the classroom.
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