By Dean Murray

A microscope image of two exceptional threads of silk from the Australian net-caster spider has been announced as the winner of the Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2025.

The competition, run in association with the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), celebrates incredible images that shed new light on hidden scientific phenomena around us.

This year’s overall winner, titled Mesmerizing spider threads, is by Dr. Martin Ramirez, a research scientist for CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council – Argentina) at the Argentinian Museum of Natural Sciences, where he works on systematics, evolutionary morphology and biogeography of spiders.

The image, taken with a scanning electron microscope (SEM), shows a 0.05-millimetre-long close-up of s

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