This will unfortunately be a very brief Spider Friday, as I am about to embark on the 5-hour drive from Los Angeles to Sequoia National Park with RunnerAAA, thereisnospoon and TheKK for what should be a blogging-free Labor Day weekend. But before I did, I couldn't help but mention something that has been in the news--namely, this.
Now, the first thing I recommend you do is just go ahead and read the NY Times article on this--namely, MILLIONS OF SPIDERS in an absolutely massive web that's beginning to cover wide swaths of a park in North Texas.
Kind of cool, isn't it? A few notes below the fold.
Let me be clear: I have no idea what's going on in North Texas. Could be a wide variety of things. I don't even know what species it is. So I'm not going to comment further. But it is a great opportunity to give an ever-so-brief introduction to colonial spiders.
Now, most of the time, you think of spiders as solitary hunters. But some of the time, they're not. Now, the most well-known example of colonial spiders in existence is the South African Agelena consociata.
I really don't have time right now to introduce you to A. consociata--also called the Colonial Spider. I'll tackle them more fully in next week's diary--I promise you, it will exist. But Colonial Spiders do everything together--weave webs, take care of young, and...capture prey.
More next week--I've got to go head up and see some big trees.