“If We Pull This Off, We’ll Eat Like Kings”
The post title is the punchline from one of the all-time best Far Side cartoons. The cartoon shows two spiders who have constructed a giant web across the bottom of a playground slide. What would you do if you walked into such a giant web in the real world? Why not ask folks down in Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas? Because they have a web big enough to catch a human strung along a hiking trail.
Entomologists are debating the origins of a massive spider web, which runs more than 180 metres and covers several trees and shrubs, found in Texas.
Officials at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near Willis Point, find the web both amazing and somewhat creepy.
"At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland," park superintendent Donna Garde said. "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."
Experts are debating whether the web is the work of social cobweb spiders working together, or a mass dispersal where the arachnids spin webs to move away from one another.
Or it could be one spider the size of a Volkswagen. It is Texas, after all. (That's the theory we're running with here in the Crabitat.) And we all know it's quite possible – we've seen it in the movies.
UPDATE: The New York Times has picked up the story.
Mike Quinn, the state biologist who distributed the online photos, and who runs a Web site about Texas invertebrates, plans to drive to the park from Central Texas on Friday in an effort to get some answers by collecting samples.
Record-breaking rains that flooded Texas earlier this summer inspired outbreaks of crickets and “webworms,” the caterpillar larvae of the white moth. Mr. Quinn said the rains might have something to do with the web, too.
“You’d have to get a lot of spiders together and feed them a whole lot of food to make a web that big,” he said.
Whatever caused the vast web, the sight of it has inspired both awe and revulsion.
“It’s beautiful,” said the park’s superintendent, Donna Garde.
Freddie Gowin disagrees. It was Mr. Gowin, a maintenance worker at the park, who discovered the web this month when, taking advantage of some of the first dry weather, he mowed the area around the nature trail.
“I don’t think there’s anything pretty about it,” he said, though “it’s certainly unusual.”
When Mr. Gowin drives the power mower through the area, webbing wraps across his bare face, causing him to slap at spiders, real or imagined, crawling on his skin.
Don't slow down, Mr. Gowin, don't slow down.
By Dan Patterson, August 30, 2007 @ 6:15 pm
What is a damned “metre”? Some kind of faggoty Euromeasure, I suppose. Well, what the hell is it doing in gd TEXAS, and why is my web torn all to hell?
Love and Kisses,
Spiderman