Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Giant Spider Web

Posted by Hemos on from the lloth-where-are-you? dept.

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.""

4 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Saturday revisited by Trane+Francks · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    ...a FreeDOS contributor: http://www.freedos.org/
    1. Re:Saturday revisited by Trane+Francks · · Score: 2, Interesting

      > 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?

      Oy, you think I'd learn to compose an intelligible pair of sentences by now. :rolleyes:

      To clarify: The trigger, I think, would have to be pheromonal in nature, but what would bring about such a huge release of pheromones to trigger the behaviour in a spider population covering some 60 hectares?

      An additional question that everybody seems to have missed is the species involved. All the questions I've seen have discussed the matter along the lines of it being a single species. Anybody who's taken a look in their own back yard would recognize that there are a bunch of species living together in a very small area. Imagine, then, the number of species involved in the building of this web. It's inconceivable to me that there would be 2 spiders/sq. cm ALL OF THE SAME SPECIES covering 60 hectares.

      That, then, amplifies the cause of behaviour that quite probably involved up to 100 species of spiders over the area. Even were it only a handful of species, it's the equivalent of a trigger that causes ALL primates to engage in the same activity.

      Kinda puts that one into perspective, doesn't it?

      --
      ...a FreeDOS contributor: http://www.freedos.org/
    2. Re:Saturday revisited by Trane+Francks · · Score: 3, Interesting
      it would be pretty damn bizarre if several species of spider were able to coexist for so long without eating each other.
      You think so? It's common for web-weavers to live in close proximity to one another. On a recent nature walk with my family, I found one bush that had no less than a dozen species of weavers living quite in harmony with one another. The whole "eating each other" business happens between hunter-types that don't weave webs and the web-weavers (or other hunter-types). It's a rare thing to hear of, say, two orb-weavers of the same species crossing over to another's web so as to attack and eat.

      As for reports of Halorates ksenius, hell, I can only fine a single google result for that. Where are all these reports? Links, please.
      --
      ...a FreeDOS contributor: http://www.freedos.org/
  2. Creepy little spiders by phorm · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I'm not a huge fan of spiders, but I'm not completely freaked out by them and this is pretty cool. With the amount of little arachnids crawling around ,wouldn't the entire area around this web also be infested by spiders? Just walking near it would probably have a bunch of little eight-legged wonders crawling up your pantleg (yoiks). 60 acres is a lot of land... so a few things I would like to know are:
    • 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?