A spider web unlike any seen before
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Some other stories about it that got no traction here: https://www.livescience.com/animals/spiders/worlds-biggest-s..., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worlds-largest-sp...
They do hunt millipedes and then drag the corpses back to their lair to form a millipede graveyard.
I think it’s their speed which I don’t like!
Pheromones, interpretive dance, telepathy,—I don’t know exactly how the others get the message but I know that they do, and they stay on the correct side of the doorway.
Next morning, the wasp (now with tattered wings) was sitting in the corner of a window. I have no idea how it made it out.
Lately I have been trying to get macro photos of spiders hanging on their threads and so far failing because they see the camera and drop down a foot before I can set up the shot.
Rare if ever happens. Maybe 5 times in your life time. I will pay that cost any day. I have made friends with spiders. Flies spread diseases, spiders eat them. Spiders seldom bite humans and when they do, it’s nowhere near as bad as getting scratched by a cat.
I've never been prevented from sleep by a spider buzzing around the room, either.
Ever wonder where those flies have been? Maybe on some nice smelly garbage, and then on your food or your dishes. Flies carry diseases, man.
> and get stuck to some fly paper
Glue traps are cruel.
I managed to take the web off it, but not without tearing off the part of the wing that made contact. I assume that in the butterfly's best-case scenario, that would have happened anyway. It was able to fly afterwards.
https://www.peta.org/issues/wildlife/wildlife-factsheets/glu...
If there is nothing in your house for the spiders to eat, you won't have spiders. If you remove the spiders but not their prey (flies, etc...), you will have more flies, and spiders will keep coming back.
The reason the spider web in the article is so huge is that there is a huge amount of flies to feed the spiders.
> “But in the cave, because it’s dark in there, our hypothesis was that they do not see each other,” Blerina Vrenozi, a biologist, zoologist and ecologist at the University of Tirana in Albania said in an interview. “So they do not attack.”
I thought one of the major purposes of spiderwebs was that the spider can detect the presence of something else in the web without needing to be able to see it.
But they do have 8 eyes, so I’m assuming they make visual confirmation. But these cave spiders are in the dark…
Most spiders have terrible eyesight despite having eight eyes. Those with good eyesight are jumping spiders, portia, and a few ground spiders. These species are easily distinguished by having two large front-facing eyes.
Due to bad eyesight, most spiders use touch through their webs and/or hairs. The hirsute species can easily identify pretty much anything that causes a wind current near them, and most all species can easily identify prey by the distinct vibrations they make once caught in the web.
If you watch most spiders, however, they can occasionally be fooled on windy day when a leaf or other detritus hits their webs, and they have to go touch it to find out it isn't prey. Eyesight just isn't a thing most are great with.
But if the smaller spiders can fight back at all, it might well make that battle less appealing.
The archive.today copy doesn't play the video. The thumbnail image is present. The <video> tag is present on the archived page, but its src attribute has been renamed to "old-src". Re-renaming the old-src attribute back to "src" will cause the video to play, but at that point you're playing the original non-archived video directly from nyt.com. This will presumably break if NYT takes the video down.
Does archive.today not archive videos?
What can sustain that number of spiders so far underground?
> The vast spider population is attributed to an abundant food supply: more than 2.4 million midges in the cave, ready to be entangled in the intricate web.
...although I guess the question then is what sustains the millions of midges!
So the whole food-chain here is: sulfur -> bacteria -> midges -> spiders.
Akin to hydrothermal vents[1] in the ocean, and the lifeforms that eat that effluent.
[0] https://subtbiol.pensoft.net/article/162344/ ("An extraordinary colonial spider community in Sulfur Cave (Albania/Greece) sustained by chemoautotrophy")
> "Stable isotope analyses (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N) revealed that the trophic web sustaining this assemblage is fueled by in situ primary production from sulfur-oxidizing microbial biofilms then transferred through chironomid larvae and adults to higher trophic levels."
This is a hugely erroneous claim that is much too frequently encountered in the popular publications.
Both in this cave and in hydrothermal vents, most autotrophic bacteria use free oxygen to oxidize the hydrogen sulfide, producing thus the energy needed for autotrophy.
The free oxygen comes from the phototrophic algae and plants (located elsewhere), i.e. from solar energy.
On Earth, there are only 2 kinds of autotrophic bacteria and archaea that may be independent from solar energy, the acetogenic bacteria and archaea and the methanogenic archaea. Both kinds obtain energy from free hydrogen and carbon dioxide, the former producing acetic acid and the latter producing methane.
These 2 kinds of bacteria and archaea need free hydrogen and most of them are killed by free oxygen. Sometimes the free hydrogen is produced by fermentation of organic substances, like in our intestines, so also coming from solar energy, but free hydrogen is also produced by the oxidation of volcanic rocks by water, when its origin is independent of solar energy and dependent only on the internal heat of the Earth, which produces volcanic rocks that are in chemical equilibrium at high temperatures deep inside the Earth's mantle, but they are no longer in chemical equilibrium after reaching the cold surface of the Earth.
Thus deep underground or in certain places on the bottom of the oceans, where free dihydrogen is abundant and there exists no free dioxygen, there are communities of acetogenic and methanogenic bacteria and archaea that are independent of solar energy, but this is not the case for this cave and for many of the hydrothermal vents, where both hydrogen sulfide and free dioxygen are abundant, so aerobic bacteria are dominant.
Anywhere where there is either air or water with dissolved dioxygen, the living beings use the most efficient energy source, i.e. the oxidation of either organic or anorganic substances with the free dioxygen, so they depend on solar energy, even when there is no light in that place.
Nature is always several steps ahead.
In everyday parlance we say that you have a job and you have the skill, and in reality you actually are free to take your skill elsewhere. Your skill plays a part in the market value of your employer, but you stay or leave at your whim, the "owner" of the "asset" doesn't decide.
Those billions are IMO mostly an accounting fiction — it's better to think of it in the way that our ordinary language suggests, where your actions are yours, your skills are yours, etc. If you drive to work, that's your emissions based on your choice, it's not a choice made by someone whose great wealth is mostly an assessment of your skill and earning power.
If you build a house and need some concrete for that, CO₂ is emitted in a concrete factory, but I think it's better to regard the emitted CO₂ as a choice made by you than as emissions by the billionaire who owns the factory. Even if the accountants assess the value of the factory as a large number.
Something as simple as a bakery is amazing.
That seems remarkably warm. Is that typical for cave temperatures?
Although, in terms of numbers, according to that Wikipedia: “Several permutations of social behavior exist amongst the 23 species of spider considered to be quasi-social out of some 45,000 known species of spider”
>“But in the cave, because it’s dark in there, our hypothesis was that they do not see each other,”
Will they start fighting one another now lights are being shone on them?
Or are they building a structure that's attractive for bugs to enter? What's the strategy for this web?
"The wider web is actually a pastiche of thousands of individual funnel-shaped webs,"
While preparing one window in the bedroom I discovered a silken patch like a miniature of the one depicted in this article. I used my cleaning rag to wipe it away thinking any inhabitants had long since moved on. To my surprise a wisp tiny spiders scurried away from my swipe, disappearing into crevices, the base board, and carpet. Startled and not seeing any to kill, I bid them farewell, in my mind assuring myself they had moved on.
That same day or the next a cold wave came through and I lied awake in bed listening to the plastic I had applied rustle from the wind. The window gaps were bigger than I’d thought. Falling into a fitful sleep under not quite adequate blankets, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my lower leg! I jumped out of bed, turned a light, and found upon examination three red punctures on my left calf. Recalling the spiders from the day before I shook out my blankets and bed sheets. I checked below the bed. Nothing, I never found the culprits.
After sleeping that night on the couch, I awoke late the next. I felt feverish and disoriented. The wounds on my calf had become inflamed. The cold in the apartment added to my discomfort.
The next few days were a blur. I missed work and the few social engagements I had planned. Eventually the wounds began to heal but I was still bone cold and the light from windows hurt my eyes. Winter has set in and the plastic I’d applied to the windows had detached from the wind allowing icy drafts into the apartment. I diligently applied another layer of plastic on the windows, this time using packing tape to secure the corners!
It was a harsh winter and I repeated this process several times until the windows were opaque and along with the shades allowing very little light through.
One day as I sat in the dark slowly eating my meal there was a knock on the door. It was my close friend from work wondering what had happened to me. I must have been a sight judging from his startled appearance.
Summer came and I emerged occasionally to acquire food and other necessities only to scurry back home when the outside became too overwhelming. I eventually found remote work, and here I am today in my cold dark apartment with high ceilings and drafty windows.
Note if you made it to the end, thanks for indulging me. This is based on a real apartment, windows and spiders!
Anyone that watched Stargate Atlantis gets it.
Over a shot of a bunch of people walking around with no masks on?
> “All you could smell was sulfur hydrogen, and you cannot breathe,” Dr. Vrenozi said, recalling that most of the researchers were wearing masks. But as they descended deeper into the cave, she said that “you get used to the smell of spoiled eggs.”
Also, you use "" but you are not quoting, the text inside your quotes does not exist in the article. The actual quote would be
> The cave is hard to reach and is filled with foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas, in concentrations too great for most animals to live there.
With hydrogen sulfide, olfactory fatigue can occur at 100 ppm, and paralysis of the olfactory nerve has been reported at 150 ppm[1]. Those levels are considered "immediately dangerous to life and health (level that interferes with the ability to escape)"[3]
So you might think the gas is gone or that you're "used to it", but you're being poisoned and are at risk of losing consciousness and dying.
However, according to [2], "the atmosphere in [Sulfur Cave] can reach concentrations of up to 14 ppm of H2S". According to [4] that's below the "acceptable ceiling concentration" of 20 ppm, with up to 50 ppm for a 10-minute period being acceptable for an 8-hour shift. So these levels are in the "not great, not terrible" category. Wearing a mask is highly advisable.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208170/
[2] https://subtbiol.pensoft.net/article/162344/
[3] https://www.osha.gov/hydrogen-sulfide/hazards
[4] https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19...
No longer noticing the smell is NOT a good thing!
I'm not sure if NYT articles are known to change their images and captions for different viewers? I checked the archived link too.
>Acute inhalation exposure to high concentrations may result in collapse, respiratory paralysis, cyanosis, convulsions, coma, cardiac arrhythmias, and death within minutes.
>Exposure to low concentrations may irritate the eyes and respiratory tract, resulting in sore throat, cough, and dyspnoea.
I guess they were at the low end.