Silver Spider

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The Silver Spider is a fictional species of spider created for the film The Future is Wild. The silver spider is a colonial spider that inhabits the Great Plateau 100 million years from now. The silver spider is silvery to reflect ultraviolet light. Otherwise its greenish stripes along its silvery body is used to foil its main predator: the Great Blue Windrunner. Since the windrunner sees in ultraviolet light, the silver spider creates an ultraviolet pattern that makes it imitate a grass tree seed.

Silver spiders are divided into castes depending on size. The smallest and youngest spiders start a web by ballooning over a ravine, trailing a line of silk behind it. Larger web-building spiders start the framework of the web and fill in the gaps. These webs are for trapping grass-tree seeds, which are blown by the wind into the webs. Harvester spiders collect the seeds and pile them in their nest. These seeds are fed to poggles, the main food for the spiders and the last species of mammal. This is not a surprising relationship for today leafcutter ants do a similar thing: collect leaves to feed to a fungus. The largest member of the spider colony is the queen, which grows to the size of a football and is the only spider to breed in the colony. When the fat poggles living in the silver spider colony are killed, one by one, often according to the poggle's age, they are fed to the queen first to trigger a reproductive hormone to produce eggs and eventually, more spiders.