Don't know about spiders, but insects employ two strategies that I know of. 
One is to burrow into the ground below the frost line. The other is to 
replace their blood (hemolymph) with a substance with a much lower freezing 
point than water (glycerol?).

Right about now the skunk cabbages are getting ready to bloom. They are able 
to melt the snow and ice around their flowers by generating mass amounts of 
heat.


"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:4988108c$1@news.povray.org...
> And so, the world outside is currently covered in snow. And that raises a 
> very important question: How do spiders survive this weather?
>
> As far as I know, there's only one multicellular animal that can survive 
> actually being frozen solid. (It's a small frog that lives in the Andes. 
> Every winter it freezes solid, yet in the spring when it thaws it's 
> miraculously still alive.) Normally the growing ice crystals rip through 
> cell membranes, killing the organism.
>
> Given that the world outside is under about 5 cm of snow right now, with 

> invertabrat with no capacity for heat generation remains alive. But alive 
> they somehow remain...

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