What's the biggest spider web?

Factual Questions
1

This question came to me courtesy of a bunch of things slamming together in my mind:

  1. Various “camel spider” threads complete with pictures of really big, scary-looking spiders.
  2. A recent Far Side thread with one of my favorite lines: “If this works, we’ll eat like kings!”
  3. I caught The Thief of Bagdhad on cable over the weekend.

So here’s the question:

What’s the biggest creature that is regularly caught in a spider’s web, and eaten by the spider? Put another way, just how big, and how strong, can a real spider web get? Or, what’s the biggest, baddest, scariest web-spinning spider?

2

Talk about synchronicity! I just posted a “giant spider” question!

Oh, and check this out. Not one spider, mind you. But big & scary in its own right.

3

I have seen one in Kenya that was probably a good twenty feet across, between two treetops forty feet off the ground. I noticed it because I saw lots of beetle and butterfly parts on the ground and looked up. The spider was sat in the web and looked pretty beefy :eek:

I doubt whether they catch anything much bigger than grasshoppers or big beetles though, since from experience even a locust has a lot of momentum when flying (ouch!) and would probably tear straight through a web, which wouldn’t be good. More effective to catch lots of smaller insects than a few big ones.