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Giant Spider Web 40

Posted by Hemos 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.""
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Giant Spider Web

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  • Saturday revisited (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Trane Francks ( 10459 ) <trane@gol.com> on Thursday November 28, 2002 @08:42AM (#4774366) Homepage
    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.
    • > 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?

      • 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.


        The species involved is Halorates ksenius. All reports so far indicate only one species involved, which makes perfect sense when combined with the facts that the spiders, unable or unwilling to leave the area, just kept reproducing. Also, apparently the adults were living rather longer than expected, adding to the population. Since spiders don't reproduce across species lines, such a situation would lead to an increase in whatever species that population happened to consist of. There is no reason for it to be any more surprising that all involved spiders were of the same species--and in fact it would be pretty damn bizarre if several species of spider were able to coexist for so long without eating each other.
        • 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.
          • 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.
            Granted. But would you suggest that it is common for spiders to share webs with spiders of other species? One might also note that it's quite rare to find a web of this size, too.
            As for reports of Halorates ksenius, hell, I can only fine a single google result for that. Where are all these reports? Links, please.
            The local news--the Vancouver Sun is one. The rest I haven't found links for. It's true that you won't find many links to that name on Google, but you'll have (slightly) more luck with Excite--if you (unlike me) read Russian. Otherwise the name only seems to show up on academic lists of known spiders, and the only reference given is a 1928 work. Anyway, this is all beside the point. All I was trying to say was this: you noted that some spiders behave a certain way, and presumed to then conclude that these spiders necessarily behave the same way. That does not follow. Perhaps it's inconceivable to you that they all belong to the same species, but you gave no supporting evidence beyond supposition--and then chose the very weakest of my counterarguments with which to take issue (the fact that web weavers don't tend to eat each other).

            Whenever somebody says something is inconceivable, I think of all the people who have used that word throughout history--not many of whom were proved right in the long run.

            • But would you suggest that it is common for spiders to share webs with spiders of other species?
              The whole point of this (discussion and news items) is that there's nothing common about any of it. Not only would it be hard to imagine multiple species jointly sharing the job of weaving such a web, it is hard to envisage tens of millions of the same species populating the area so densly.
              One might also note that it's quite rare to find a web of this size, too.
              It's possibly the largest web that we've ever seen.
              you noted that some spiders behave a certain way, and presumed to then conclude that these spiders necessarily behave the same way. That does not follow.
              Well, then, show me some facts to the contrary and I will very open-mindedly follow up. Understand, the study of aranaea and mantidae is a serious hobby for me and I'm engaging you in this discussion not to win a point but to gain information.
              Perhaps it's inconceivable to you that they all belong to the same species, but you gave no supporting evidence beyond supposition
              Okay, I'll bite: what supporting evidence beyond supposition have you provided in this regard? Making such a claim and then failing to provide same doesn't add to your credibility. Are you speaking from your knowledge of aranaea and it's members' behaviour or are you just attempting to diffuse my "argument"?

              I'm trying to draw out facts and I'm unable to get anything other than the name of a species for which there is virtually no information publicly available. This is rather frustrating. While the Vancouver Sun may have reported this information, they certainly didn't bother to put it on the web. *sigh*

              If Halorates ksenius exhibits a tendency to cross over to neighbouring webs to feast, as you seem to suggest, or engages in massive-scale communal web weaving regularly, this would be radical behaviour that differs from any other web-weaver of which I'm familiar. It's also worth noting the difference between the more common "silk atop clover" communal weave versus the scope of this web, which was non-sticky, thick enough to support a handful of loonies and was suspended a metre or more above the ground.

              As for inconceivable (usage 2: So unlikely or surprising as to have been thought impossible -- American Heritage Dictionary), it still is. I'm having trouble with the idea of a 60-acre field having a Halorates ksenius population density of 2 spiders/cm. Even without the web, this would be highly unusual, don't you think? For an area to sustain such a large population of a single species, conditions there must be/have been extraordinary. And since I am unable to find any useful information with which to follow up, I cannot determine whether this apparently huge population of Halorates ksenius had forced out other species or were living alongside them.

              It's frustrating to have so many questions and precious few answers.
              • Okay, so I did manage to find one useful article in the Vancouver Sun online: 60-acre spider web baffles biologists [canada.com]

                Thanks for the hint re: the Sun. Sadly, although "Halorates ksenius" is mentioned in the article, the search engine didn't find it. Figures. It took some work -- several hits produced search engine runtime errors -- but the last check struck gold.

                Cheers!
              • I am not taking issue with your spider expertise, just with the logic behind your assertion that the web can only be the work of multiple species. I haven't offered any evidence because I haven't made any assertions--just an observation that I thought it would be quite odd for spiders to share a web (although my actual wording was admittedly quite poor).

                And I have no idea where the whole 'crossing to other webs to attack' thing you keep mentioning comes from--I neither implied nor stated that this was going on. The point is that it's not neighbouring webs--it's one web. Check out the pictures. There are zillions of the little critters all over the same chunks of web.

                The major difference here is that you are stating that the web *must* be the work of multiple species. I am simply stating that there is insufficient evidence available (to us armchair types) to make this statement. I feel my credibility here is fine, as I'm not the one making unfounded statements. Given the available information, it is scientifically irresponsible to draw a conclusion without further research. Spiders are not my point. The scientific method is.

                At any rate, I contacted Dr. Thair for his observations, so we can lay this to rest before it becomes any more of a pissing contest than it is. According to him, the population (of around 10^8 spiders) comprised 99.999% H. ksenius, of which 95% were mature males and females. He mentioned the presence of a "couple of bigger wolf spiders which were doing their best to get the hell out of there".
    • 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.

      You mean a trigger such as posting a story on Slashdot, causing thousands of users to flock to a single web site?

      Karma: Basking in the warm afterglow of post-coital whoring.
      • Uhm............no. Leave it to a Slashdotter to completely miss the significance of an event and use it as an excuse to try to appear witty.
        • And, I'll add, if you don't think the military is taking OBSCENE interest in this whole business, brew another pot of coffee. Imagine being able to understand pheromones to the point that you could load up a Stealth Bomber, fly over Country X, drop your payload and 30 minutes later have the entire population off copulating. We're talking about CHEMICAL TRIGGERS here -- behaviour that would not be thwarted by anybody's best intentions.

          Dope the country, walk in and take over. You wanna bet that any military mind worth its salt is watching this shit very closely.
          • I'll agree that the use of pheremones has military applications, but I don't see it happening. Maybe it's 'cause I'm just too cynical, or I don't have the mind set of Oliver Stone, or it's because I live in Canada.

            I also think that if the military (I'm assuming you're talking US military) is taking an interest in it (which I doubt), it's not, as you say, an OBSCENE interest. If the DoD develops (at a great expense) some kind of pheremonal weapon, then
            1) It will be branded as a cruel and unusual weapon by the general public.
            2) It will be easy for terrorists to steal and use. (can't have that!)

            And at the risk of sounding humourous, the thought of a testing accident that would affect civilians bring chills to my spine and a tent to my trousers. Now there's a business plan...
            1) Create pheromone that induces copulation
            2) ????
            3) Hell, who cares about profit!!!
          • Wouldn't, say, nerve gas have much the same effect and last longer? People can fuck for only so long, but they stay dead forever.

            Mind you, there's a certain weird poetry to the pheromone idea, but I think it would be less grand orgy and more mass rape, as such triggers would inevitably fire at different rates for different people.

            And really, you could get a similar effect with, for instance, LSD.

    • maybe it wasn't chemical (Score:4, Insightful)

      by zogger ( 617870 ) on Thursday November 28, 2002 @04:24PM (#4776621) Homepage Journal
      --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.
    • The question, however, is what climactic or chemical trigger caused millions and millions of spiders to behave identically?

      This is clearly a case of Vampiric Ants/Beese infecting pure, independant spiders with their socialist mindset.

  • Obviously (Score:5, Funny)

    by LittleBigLui ( 304739 ) on Thursday November 28, 2002 @08:53AM (#4774398) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • ha!
      this was the first post by me that got a +5!
      and this when the only thing i was expecting was fricken spiders with fricken lasers on their fricken heads.
      thank you, moderators!

  • significant update (Score:3, Informative)

    by shaitand ( 626655 ) on Thursday November 28, 2002 @09:04AM (#4774447) Journal
    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 :)

  • They have found the tiny spiders... (Score:3, Funny)

    by codexus ( 538087 ) on Thursday November 28, 2002 @10:24AM (#4774703)
    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 :)
  • ...I mean, it was last posted [slashdot.org] 5 days ago! That's an eternity in internet time!

    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.

  • Creepy little spiders (Score:4, Interesting)

    by phorm ( 591458 ) on Thursday November 28, 2002 @03:59PM (#4776542) Journal
    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?

  • Obvious Intent (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Friday November 29, 2002 @04:15AM (#4778861) Homepage
    They're trying to catch one of those butterfly dudes from those damn MSN ads.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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