This book, dedicated to the influential Danish spider ecologist Edwin Norgaard, contains contributions by authors from 16 European countries, and reflects the current areas of interest for researchers working with spiders, scorpions and related animals in Europe. It contains 46 original research articles and reviews covering a wide range of disciplines such as ecology and conservation, behaviour, physiology, morphology and systematics. A particular section is devoted to reproductive behaviour, with papers on sexual selection, sperm competition in relation to the structure of female genitalia, emasculation and sexual cannibalism in spiders, and parthenogenesis in scorpions. Silk, the structure and function of spider webs and how they are built, form another section. There are papers on sampling methods and faunistic analyses of the biodiversity and conservation value of spider communities from several types of habitats (forests, dunes, bogs etc.) in various European countries.
Other papers deal with the value of spiders for agriculture, prey capture strategies, spiders' parasites, life cycles, neuronal mapping of reflex behaviour, the systematic classification of spiders and local faunistics.