Millions of Spiders Seen In Mass Dispersal Event In Nova Scotia 81
Freshly Exhumed writes A bizarre and oddly beautiful display of spider webs have been woven across a large field along a walking trail in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. "Well it's acres and acres; it's a sea of web," said Allen McCormick. Prof. Rob Bennett, an expert on spiders who works at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, BC, Canada, said tiny, sheet-web weaver spiders known as Erigoninae linyphiidae most likely left the webs. Bennett said the spiders cast a web net to catch the wind and float away in a process known as ballooning. The webs in the field are the spiders' drag lines, left behind as they climb to the top of long grass to be whisked away by the wind. Bennett said it's a mystery why these spiders take off en masse.
Underwhelming picture (Score:5, Funny)
Once you find the link to the article (after links to every vaguely related topic) you'll find a very underwhelming picture of some bits of web in a field. I was expecting something like the scale and impressiveness of a crop circle in web form, not a few bits of tatty web on the tops of some long grass.
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Pfffft, agreed, a bit more like this [google.com.au].
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Nyyaaaaaaahhhhhhh that is the creepiest thing I have ever seen, I hate spiders. My skin is still crawling.
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I expected little less than this [sciencedaily.com]
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Re:Underwhelming picture (Score:4, Funny)
"Bennett said it's a mystery why these spiders take off en masse."
No it's not. Have you seen how fucking cold it gets in Canada in the winter?
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Well that explains why they take off at all...
Why they do it en masse is probably the same reason cicada bugs hatch en masse:
1) easier to breed when there are others of your species around (and when you are going where ever the wind takes you in order to end up at the same place, you probably need to leave at the same time)
2) when you are an insect that makes up a large portion of the diet for birds and bat who are trying to eat as much as they can before hibernating you are most likely to make it out alive
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Unlike Australia 2 years ago.. (Score:3)
http://www.buzzfeed.com/gavon/... [buzzfeed.com] [wow look at that spelling]
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maybe this will make up for it.
http://www.wired.com/2013/02/t... [wired.com]
When 20-year-old web designer Erick Reis left a friend’s house on Sunday, he saw what looked like thousands of spiders overhead, reported G1, a Brazilian news site, on Feb. 8. The large, sturdy spiders were hanging from power lines and poles, and crawling around on a vast network of silk strands spun over the town of Santo Antonio da Platina.
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Here try this report. Unrelated the article, but if you want pictures of webs it's hard to beat.
http://www.entsoc.org/PDF/2010/Orb-weaving-spiders.pdf [entsoc.org]
As an interagency team with expertise in arachnology, urban entomology, and structural pest management, we were unprepared for the sheer scale of the spider population and the extraordinary masses of both three-dimensional and sheet-like webbing that blanked much of the facility’s cavernous interior.
Thanks for the nightmares (Score:1)
Millions of tiny spiders in a field and then airborne. Who needs sleep, eh?
The Slashdot Website (Score:1)
It seems to have become the Nature Channel with topics.
At least if they come across to the UK (Score:1)
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I'm not too proud to admit I got the reference :)
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Please explain.
The little spiders are one or two millimetres long (Score:1)
Hah, where I live we have 8 feet spiders!
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Think of all those little spider feet tickling in your sinuses!
Constable country (Score:1)
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I have been told that spiders on these 'balloons' can escape earth gravety
Have you tried thinking about that statement a little more critically? Or to put it another way, did the aeroplane flying overhead just escaped earth's gravity?
Re: Constable country (Score:1)
So long... (Score:3)
...and thanks for all the flies?
Cricket pitch (Score:2)
This year, I sat on camping chair at the edge of a cricket pitch on a fine July evening in the UK. Over the 90 minutes I and the other couple of dozen spectators were repeatedly brushing tiny spiders off our heads. Average height of grass, 1 cm, cf 1 m for those previously comfortable humans.
Only question is did we arrive in a normal migration cycle or did the appearance of a hundredfold increase in launchpad height stimulate the spiders?
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Who's gonna freak out more? (Score:2)
Those are not Spiders. ... (Score:2)
This [wikipedia.org] is a spider.
Spiders flee before it (Score:4, Funny)
T.Y. for the memories (Score:1)
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Is it really a mystery? (Score:1)
Obligatory Welcome (Score:2)
Shit, that means the Earth is hatching. (Score:2)
I saw that episode.
Floods - National Geographic (Score:2)
National Geographic did a story about spiders fleeing to higher ground when facing floods. The massed spiders end up enclosing entire trees with their webs.
http://news.nationalgeographic... [nationalgeographic.com]
Oblig XKCD (Score:2)