Tag: spiders

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Mass spider web in Texas

We really don’t mean to pick on our arachnophobes. Personally, we love spiders. Harry, our own tarantula, is a beloved part of the Museum and we respect the spider’s amazing place in the food chain (especially considering all the trouble they seem to have from wasps here and here). Creepy as some people find them, they do some amazing things.

We showed you amazing video of a spider migration a while back. This time it’s a mass web, created by a group of spiders in Rowlett, Texas. ABC affiliate, WFAA, reported Thousands of spiders have spun a massive communal web at Rowlett’s Lakeside Park South. As this video shows, the trees are literally draped in webs spun by spiders who have banded together to take advantage of all of the insect life in the region.

Spiders are normally pretty solitary creatures. But under certain conditions they will spin these amazing communal webs which blanket an area. Wired had a report in 2010 about an amazing 4-acre web that occurred in a Baltimore, Maryland water treatment plant. The original report was written by Albert Greene, Jonathan A. Coddington, Nancy L. Breisch, Dana M. De Roche, and Benedict B. Pagac Jr. for the Entomological Society of America. It contains amazing photographs and detailed data of the infestation.

This is nature at its most amazing!

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Rain of spiders

It’s an arachnophobe’s worst nightmare… spiders literally raining from the sky, falling into everything and leaving a debris of web. That was what many experienced recently in the Australian city of Goulburn.  (See amazing photos from the Sydney Morning Herald.) This isn’t the first time such a thing has happened either. This video shows an incident two years ago in Brazil.

https://youtu.be/htSDlXzWV-w?t=1m17s

While bizarre, this is a natural event when a large population of spiders migrates from one area to another, using a bit of web to catch the wind and fly them to a new home. Texas also had a migration in 2013.

Spiders are generally under-appreciated creatures that are often used for their fear-factor in movies. In reality, spiders consume a vast number of pests that invade the home and farm. In fact, a single spider can eliminate about 2,000 insects in a year (according to this spider fact page from the National Geographic Society).

Yes, they are weird and alien. Their lifestyle is gruesome. We’d rather have a rain of spiders than a rain of jellyfish any day.