In North Texas this summer, at Lake Tawokoni State Park, the spiders have come to live. And these spiders are doing it in a 200-yard (182 meters) web .
What?
Yes, it sounds and looks like one of those classic science fiction movies from the 1970s, where the town is webbed over and eaten by a bunch of spiders. But luckily, the only victims this web has claimed is a lot of bugs. And maybe given the creeps to a few human visitors that have passed by. Check out the video here
The Web
The 200 yards of web drapes itself from several trees, bushes, and even along the ground.
Donna Garde, the superintendent of the park, said, “At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland. Now it’s filled with so many mosquitoes that it’s turned a little brown. There are times you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in those webs.”
A local Texas Forest Service entomologist, Herbert A. Pace, believes this to be a very rare event and could even possibly be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. But the author of “A Field Guide to the Spiders and Scorpions of Texas”, John Jackman, disagrees. He says there are reports of similar webs every few years and that many just do not know that spiders are capable of such large masterpieces.
The Spiders
Obviously, an individual spider could not accomplish such a feat as this enormous web. Or at least, I would not want to meet with the spider who could! It has actually taken a group of them to achieve this webbed wonderland.
These artistic arachnids have actually not been identified yet. They are believed to either be part of species of social cobweb spiders, that make their webs together. Or they might also be a large amount of a particular species of spiders that are concentrated in one area and are using one another’s web to build on in order to have their own web, causing their webs to spread out over the large area.
Either way, entomologists have not determined the rarity or origin of this busy spider. But experts have been invited to the park to study the large web and hopefully reveal where these spiders have come from and what kind they really are.
Assumptions
We can assume that since the local entomologists cannot identify this type of spider, that they are probably not native to Texas. So that makes us again think of those spider science fiction movies, where a foreign spider escapes from someone’s collection and begins to make its home nearby. Will this unusual event hurt the native spiders and insects of the area? It would not be the first time that a plant or living thing from another region causes havoc in a new land. Hopefully, that will not be the case in this situation, and it will simply remain a sticky marvel, and nothing more.
