Centripetal Notion: entry

image © 2002 Matthew C. Wheeler

There were about two spiders per square centimetre laying the silk, which first appeared in early October. [Brian] Thair (cell biologist) said the web showed great tensile strength — enough to put a handful of coins on it without them falling through. There were “in the order of tens of millions of spiders running frantically back and forth,” but they weren’t interacting with each other. It’s just because so many of them were in the field that the web grew and grew until at its largest, 60 acres, it was as big as the triangle-shaped field it covered. Thair had never seen anything like it before. “It was astounding to see,” he said. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. From two kilometres away it looked like a sheet of wet aluminium. It was the size of several city blocks. I have never in my 30 years as a biologist seen anything like this, in terms of quantity of spiders and quantity of web. Nothing even remotely approaching this.”

LINK/IMAGES ["A 60 Acre Web of Mystery"] (via RealityCarnival)

Previously: Yellow Jacket Metropolis