ARACHNOPHOBES, look away now – what might be the world’s biggest spider web has been found.
Hidden deep inside a pitch-black cave is a mammoth web that houses upwards of 111,000 spiders, researchers say.
This “extraordinary” spider mega-colony is mostly made up of two different types of spider.
That includes 69,000 Tegenaria domestica – or the domestic house spider – and 42,000 Prinerigone vagans, a type of sheet weaver.
And they’ve crafted a web that stretches 1,140 square feet across the wall of a small cave passage.
It was found in the ‘Sulfur Cave’, which is on the border between Greece and Albania.
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The cave is part of a system with springs that feed a sulfidic stream that flows out to the Sarandaporo River.
And it’s occupied by plenty of life, including centipedes, scorpions, mites, and beetles.
But right near the cave entrance, there’s a dense swarm of flies by the stream.
And that’s helping to feed the mammoth spider colony that has taken up residence on the cave wall nearby.
“Spider colonies, sometimes exceeding 100,000 individuals, are often correlated with locally high abundance of food resources,” said István Urák, lead author on the study, from the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania.
He added that scientists had never seen this kind of colonial behaviour from these spider species before.
Scientists estimated the number of spiders by counting individual funnel-shaped webs at 30 randomly selected locations.
Then the they were able to extrapolate the numbers to make a guess for the entire web wall.
Eerily, the spiders live in total darkness – and would be a serious fright to any unwary visitors.
“The large spider colony in Sulfur Cave was mainly observed on the left bank of the sulfidic stream of Sulfur Cave,” István explained.
“In a permanently dark zone, starting at approximately 50 m from the cave entrance.
“In this section of the cave, the passage is relatively narrow, and the ceiling is mostly low.
“The location of the colonial spiderweb coincides with an area where an unusually dense swarm of small chironomid flies…hovers above the sulfidic stream that flows along the left cave wall.”
Scientists think there are as many as 2.4 million flies in that part of the cave, providing plenty of food for the spiders.
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It’s also a hotbed for reproduction, with a huge area of the spiderweb used for egg sacs.
Scientists said the density of web layers made it impossible to count how many egg cluthes there were.
But they noted that female house spiders typically lay “six to eight egg sacs” every 20 to 25 days.
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And the first cocoon usually contains up to 100 eggs, followed by “smaller successive clutches”.
Scientists writing in the Subterranean Biology journal also said that the cave population doesn’t exchange with the surface and is totally isolated from the outside world.
