Silver spider

The silver spider is a highly intelligent, colonial spider that inhabits the Great Plateau, 100 million AD, in The Future is Wild.

The great blue windrunner is not the only resident of the Great Plateau to make use of ultraviolet light. Just as some species of spiders in previous times spun webs with an ultraviolet sheen in order to attract insects, so too do the spiders of this time. Spread across the slopes of the Great Plateau, giant silver webs billow gently in the wind. Their ultraviolet sheen attracts not just insects, but also the unwanted attention of windrunners, which swoop down to feed on the silver spiders that scurry about busily on the silken fibers.

From time to time, at one of the landing points of fluffy grass tree seeds, they pick up a little passenger.

A young silver spider, silver in color and measuring only a fraction of an inch across, will grasp one of the seeds and will use its voluminous parachute to carry both of them aloft. As the young silver spider rides the gusts of wind clinging to the seed, it pays out a strand of silk moored to the rock from which it hitched a ride. Often the seed takes the spider so far that its journey is pointless, but on this occasion the two touch down on the other side of the gorge, where the juvenile silver spider tumbles off and secures the other end of the web strand.