The discovery of a vast and thickening web with million of spiders found in the North Texas, Lake Tawakoni State park has sparked a debate amongst scientists and visitors. The web which spread across miles has a lot of trees covered and is so thick that at some places it has blocked the sunlight also. Astonishing is the fact that where spiders are believed to be solitary creatures don’t usually make community webs. The intricate web as per the reports emits a faint odor, most probably coming from the dead insects stuck to the web.
A spider expert at Texas A & M University, Allen Dean describes this web as a ‘rather spooky, kind of like Halloween.’ What amazes experts like Dean is that ’social’ spiders or rather their species are not found outside of the tropics. The experts are speculating the web as a community web of cobweb spiders. However, cobwebs take more than a year to build such webs and this one has come up in just a few months. Some are also reasoning it as just a ballooning of the spiders which five years ago covered about 25 hectares of field in British Columbia in the same way. Mike Quinn, the state biologist who runs a Web site about Texas invertebrates said that there can be a relation between the web and the record-breaking rains that flooded Texas this season.
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