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.""

Comments

significant update

[shaitand]

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.

Re:Saturday revisited

[Trane Francks]

hectares? It was acres, according to the top level post.

According to the professor who discovered the web, it was a 60-hectare field, making this web likely the largest ever discovered. It should be noted that although the print article at the CBC states acres, the radio interview http://cbc.ca/clips/ram-audio/aih_spiderweb_021121 .ram clearly states hectares at the beginning. Either way, it's a bloody big web.

I thought a hectare was 100 square acres.

A measure of area, or superficies, containing a hundred ares, or 10,000 square meters, and equivalent to 2.471 acres.

2 spiders sq/cm? That's a lot of spiders. I think that had to be a typo.

Not a typo. This information was gleaned from actually listening to the interview with the professor who discovered the web. We're talking tens of millions of spiders who were so focused on the job of spinning the web that they were running over each other. Absolutely fascinating.