I can’t share the video as it’s on a private facebook page, but a friend of mine just shared a video she took of the fence and electric wires bordering her property. (The fence consists, basically, in wire as well.) It’s covered, densely over every inch, with what appears to maybe be spider silk strands, floating in the wind, one end attached to the wiring, the other end flying free. She says this is covering over a mile of fencing.
What is this phenomenon? Are there other records of it online? Is it spiders? How many damn spiders?!
Anyone else remember the children’s novel Charlotte’s Web? At the very end, all of Charlotte’s children float away on “balloons” of a sort, made of spider silk.
Can’t find the tread I thought there was here when it last occurred around Goulburn in May, though there was a more spectacular event in Albury in 2012.
Figure a 10, 000 spiders per hectare, and figure that your fence will snag every spider that launches from within 100m of the fence. Those are very conservative estimates.
ETA: Beaten by **Blake **who’s the expert. I gotta learn to refresh stale tabs before posting.
Probably what **jasg **said in post #3.
I know there’s an event which happens in (IIRC) springtime in and around Dallas, Texas most years.
It’s a mass hatching or breeding or ??? of spiders. The sky will be full of cotton-ball sized blobs of silk trailing 18-24" streamers. IIRC the blobs are egg sacs. They are everywhere for a day or two, then disappear as mysteriously as they came.
But during those spiderful days every fence, tree, roadsign, car, and tumbleweed is decorated with the stuff.
For us in the flying biz they aren’t dangerous provided you know to expect them. Otherwise you might think it was a flock of birds or some such. Which are dangerous and would need to be avoided on landing.
The timing of this thread is propitious. Just this week, the Cecil’s current article on the front page (a reprint from Dec. 23, 2011) tells of a similar case, happening inside someone’s living room :eek:
I’ve seen it in eastern New Mexico/Texas panhandle area. It’s wild. Sometimes the sunlight needs to be just right to clearly see it, and then you can see thin white strands hanging from everything – power lines, poles, barb wire fences, tall weeds, car antennas, you name it – all gently wafting in the breeze and all you can think is, “I hope the fucking tarantulas don’t learn to balloon like this.”
I’ve had some personal experience with just how many spiders are in a single egg sac. As a kid, I put one into a jar to see what happened, and when those guys hatched (all in a single night!) there had to be a thousand of them trying to get out of that jar. It was simply an unfathomable number of spiders. It was hard to believe they all could have fit into the original egg sac at all.
