We recently reported on a new discovery about those zigzags you see in spider webs . Silken decorations like these are known as stabilimenta, and they can serve all kinds of purposes. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

In the case of the zigzags, it’s thought they may act like extra doorbells, letting you know when food has arrived to a broader range of the web, no matter where you, a spider, are currently standing. Now, another kind of stabilimenta has been described, but these ones aren’t just a bunch of lines, oh no.

With a central "body" and eight "legs", scientists have confirmed they are decoys made by smaller spiders to look like larger spiders. Yup, turns out spiders are really out here making little scarecro

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