An analysis of silk density in spider webs

This study explores the structural complexity of spider webs through
information-theoretic and harmonicity-based frameworks to quantify spatial
patterns in silk density across different web regions and reveal the
underlying resource allocation strategies. By analyzing the entropy of
silk density distributions across different species, we observed that the
entropy values follow a normal distribution with a mean of 1.24 bits and a
standard deviation of 0.22 bits when using 10 quantization levels. In the
second part of the paper, by measuring the harmonicity of the silk
density, we reveal that the silk density at a given point can be inferred
from its neighbors, with an average harmonicity value of 0.0039 (fraction
of total points in point cloud data). The harmonic behavior is notable for
its maximum principle, suggesting that the strongest parts of the web
appear at the boundaries, aligning with existing knowledge of spider web
construction. These findings provide a new technique for quantifying
web-building strategies and offer new insights into spider behavior and
evolution.