Saw this story in the USA Today this afternoon, straight out of Rowlett, Texas:
This isn't the first time in Texas arachnids have taken over parks with their web spinning. In 2007, in Lake Tawakoni State Park, spiders constructed more elaborate webs:
Pretty fucking boss, eh?
More reading here about the world's largest arachnid.
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If you take a stroll through one particular street in the Dallas suburb of Rowlett, you might get stumble upon a 40-foot spider web created by thousands of spiders.
C A Roan Drive near Lakeside Park South is the location of the stunning yet slightly intimidating collection of large webs, connecting tree branches together in a cottony hue of white.
“The spiders have been taking over,” said Texas A&M University’s urban entomologist Mike Merchant, “Glistening webs are draping the trees like shrouds.”
Merchant said anyone going by the webs will see thousands of “lanky spiders darting among the webs,” providing a surreal quality to the extensive webbing.
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These types of webs indicate that the particular spider species is willing to work together with other spiders to make a communal nest for numerous spiders to use, Merchant said.
This isn't the first time in Texas arachnids have taken over parks with their web spinning. In 2007, in Lake Tawakoni State Park, spiders constructed more elaborate webs:
Quote:Quote:
“When I first saw it,” said Park Superintendent Donna Garde, “I was totally amazed. What ran through my mind was that this looked like something out of a low-budget horror movie, but I was looking at something five times as big as what you’d see on a Hollywood set.”
Stumped as to the web’s origin, the initial consensus of arachnologists and entomologists who saw an online photo of the web sent by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department biologist Mike Quinn was that it may have resulted from a “mass dispersal” event. In such an event, millions of tiny spiders or spiderlings spin out silk filaments to ride air currents in a phenomenon known as “ballooning.”
Quinn collected a sample of spiders Aug. 31 from in and around the gigantic web and took them to Texas A&M University in College Station for analyses. Entomology Department researcher Allen Dean identified 11 spider families from the sample. The most prevalent species was the Tetragnatha guatemalensis, or what Quinn dubbed the Guatemalan long-jawed spider, since this species didn’t have a common name. Guatemala was the country in which it was first documented.
“I drove 50 to 100 spiders to A&M on Saturday,” Quinn said. “Spider experts tend to specialize in one or few families of spiders. There are nearly 900 species of spiders known from Texas, so no one is an expert on all the species.”
Quinn described the Lake Tawakoni web as “sheet webbing” since it covers a large area of trees, which is more typical of a web spun by a funnel web spider rather than the classic Charlotte’s web, or orb web, like that produced by long-jawed spiders. He speculates that the park’s spider population exploded due to wet conditions this summer that resulted in an abundance of midges and other a small insects upon which the spiders feed.
The Guatemalan long-jawed spider ranges from Canada to Panama, and even the islands of the Caribbean. According to Quinn, the spider is about an inch in length with a reddish-orange head- and-thorax. Spiders, like mites and scorpions, are arachnids, a group of arthropods with four pairs of legs, saclike lungs and a body divided into two segments.
Pretty fucking boss, eh?
More reading here about the world's largest arachnid.