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Giant Spider Web
Stochastic_Elastic writes "According to an article at CBC, a biology professor in northern British Columbia has discovered a giant spider web stretching 60 acres across a field. Here is a quote: "Some people have said, 'oh yes, well it's a trampoline for aliens,'" Thair joked. "Or maybe it was an effort collectively by these spiders to try and catch a sheep.""
here
Of course, we covered this here already: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/2 2/2228254&mode=thread&tid=134
Still, it's a superbly interesting phenomenon and I really DO hope they figure out the trigger for such behaviour. Personally, I think the conjecture that they ate a plentiful supply of protein-rich prey to be really reaching. The trigger for some 10-million spiders to exhibit like behaviour, IMO, is pheromonal. The question, however, is what climactic or chemical trigger caused millions and millions of spiders to behave identically?
It's an incredibly interesting question.
this was build by Dr. Evil as a prototype for an even larger one, and he will call it
The World Wide Web
Hahaha ahahahah hahahahaha.
Free as in mason.
I know we covered this already and I haven't actually read the article yet but this one has PICTURES. If you were bored and read slashdot comments you'll find the "some people say" portion actually comes from the slashdot comments.
If they intend to catch duplicate posts :)
millions of them, but off course, like in any good horror movie they don't know yet about the giant spider that's really causing all this :)
True warriors use the Klingon Google
Laugh, damn you! Laugh!
Al Gore invented it.
_
_
Yeah, yeah, I know that he was talking about the Internet, not the WWW. Call it poetic license.
Sigs are bad for your health.
- Are these spiders migrating, or rebuilding their silken home?
- How long did it take these spiders to make the web, it says early October, so maybe a little over a month?
- How fast are they spreading, and what's the estimated spider-count?
- What variety/breed of spiders are these. They all seem the same in the pictures, but are there more than one?
Ummm yeah, and lots of spiders. Hopefully they'll find out why they decided to build this megaweb (shelter in winter, perhaps?) - keep us informed eh?--maybe it wasn't a chemical trigger. Maybe it was electromagnetic. Maybe it was thermal or gravitic. Maybe it was optical. Or all of the above.
I've noticed here that mass insect behavior is way more temp related than anything else, we've just now passed our annual fall lady bug hatch. We get a spring hatch and a fall hatch, always after a cold snap, followed by a warm snap, poof, lady bugs during those two seasons. Cicadas in the summer are similar, it appears to take a pretty precise set of temps at night and humidity to trigger them all off. Too dry or too cool, much less evidence of them-they are quite loud at night, BTW.
Usually mass quantities of insects in one spot indicate one of two things, over abundance of a favored food source, or, it's yee haw mating season, or hatching out season. Flying ants/termites are another,you see hardly any most of the year, then a few days early summer gazillions of them. Hmm, love bug hatches in florida is another example, none, then gee whizz.
It might be spiders do this all the time, but this particular area just got 'a lot'. I frequtly see huge areas of the lawns here that I maintain might not have any webbing in the early morning, but just on some days there will be almost total coverage, then it stops after a few days. The deal in the article was just the over size of the phenomena, not that similar doesn't occur various insects.
Interesting either way.
Here's something I discoverd this summer. If you are familiar with "mud dauber" type wasps, sometime when feeling brave knock one down(a nest) that is in use, open it up. They eat spiders larger than they are, they apparently semi paralyse them, take them to their nests where they are stored. I opened up several this summer, upwards of 3 dozen or more still kinda alive spiders inside them. Big ones.
learn new stuff every day, cool.
You really have to wonder if any of the Editors actually read Slashdot. I suspect they do their posting of stories from the golf course or the bech or somewhere else.
The lack of professional editing is scary. However, no one seems to care, instead they just shut the detractors up by modding them down.
They are getting paid to do a job, so editors actually do your jobs.
They're trying to catch one of those butterfly dudes from those damn MSN ads.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I just had a though. If parts of the web were damaged and the spiders repaired it, why dont we start harvesting this. The goats milk spider silk is really our only means of obtaining large amounts of spider silk, but theres probably applications for a gigantic field of spider silk. Spiders dont do well in captivity, unlike silkworms, but if the cause of this web could be found we could possibly havd a way to harvest real spider silk in large quantities.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
As an addendum, I might note that mating success and eating success for females *could* depend on the quality of the web. Let's not forget that spiders are cannibalistic, and the most nutritious food for a spider is probably more spider. So, suppose you had a giant ant colony, and the male spiders were going down to get ants, and the females were eating the less successful (and thus weaker) males, and so on. Even after the ant colony was eradicated, you'd still have some continuity, because the spiders would be eating each other.
That said, I doubt that spiders could eradicate ants, unless they learned to fight side by side as an army. So what you may have here is actually a social development, not a chemical development. I , for one, will be very interested to find out if this grows naturally on its own -- or extinguishes itself.
I'm sure you realize this, but since you kept referring to "insect" behavior, I have to point out that spiders are technically NOT insects. Closely related, yes, but not insects. Spiders are their own group, arachnids. Both are arthopods of course.
Next the RIAA will be paying people to go and trample the big spider's web as they will mistake it for a web based P2P application to facilitate food sharing.