Insects have evolved fibrillar attachment devices based on wet adhesion to attach themselves to a variety of surfaces.
There are several unusual variants of orb web, many of them convergently evolved, including: attachment of lines to the surface of water, possibly to trap insects in or on the surface; webs with twigs through their centers, possibly to hide the spiders from predators; "ladder-like" webs that appear most effective in catching moths.
Core proteins evolve faster than attachment proteins, although core proteins are more multifunctional than attachment proteins, and these results are not compatible with the neutral theory of molecular evolution.
Scale-free networks can evolve through preferential attachment where new nodes are preferentially attached to well connected nodes.
In networks that have evolved via preferential attachment, older nodes should have a higher average connectivity than younger nodes [ 20].
In networks which have evolved through preferential attachment older nodes should have a higher average connectivity than younger nodes.
We also observed that core proteins evolve faster than attachment proteins in spite of their higher multifunctionality, which is incompatible with the proposal of the neutral theory of molecular evolution.
Interestingly, we found that core proteins are still evolving at a higher rate than attachment proteins in same PPI bin (fig. 3).
This complexity, comprising both the functional and structural entities of protein complexes, raises the question how the interplay of core complexes with variable attachments evolved.
For many parasites, including the one studied here, this occurs through the attachment of the parasites to the host tissues but hosts may evolve to prevent this attachment.
Many scale free networks are thought to have evolved through a preferential attachment mechanism, or "rich-get-richer" mechanism [12] in which nodes with many edges tend to gain edges at a rate higher than other nodes in the network.
