alt Hacker NewsA spider web unlike any seen before
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One half of me is fascinated by this as spiders are such amazing creatures. So long as they don't break our house rules they're welcome to stay, especially the spindles! The other half of me didn't scroll far enough down and a a slither of the video played at the bottom of the screen making me think a spider was running across my arm and made me jump!
I felt very bad for spider families who worked hard across generations to build a big and beautiful comfortable home for some clueless ancient giant with abhorrent moving appendages on its legs to tear it down with a horrific metallic instrument of torment.
Strangely reminiscent of "Children of Time"'s beginnings of spider intelligence
This is fascinating. My first question would be what are they catching?
What can sustain that number of spiders so far underground?
The big problem with farming spiders for silk is that you can’t have a dense colony of them. This could a solution to that. Breeding these to make super strong silk to harvest would be really cool. Although you have to have a way of separating the strands to make thread.
I had so many thoughts about web spiders (crawlers) and what they might create that's never been seen before, until I read this article.
Nature is always several steps ahead.
We did it, we discovered Pharloom.
> The cave stays at about 80 degrees year-round.
That seems remarkably warm. Is that typical for cave temperatures?
The earth is full of wonders but we're destroying most of them.
Spiders are super solitary creatures. I wonder, though, if they could become social.
What advantage would the inside spiders have? Surely they wouldn't catch any bugs?
Or are they building a structure that's attractive for bugs to enter? What's the strategy for this web?
If some spiders of these two species are going to find new home without dark, will they continue to be friends?
> The team of scientists discovered that 69,000 Tegenaria domestica, known as the barn funnel weaver, were living with about 42,000 Prinerigone vagans, which inhabit wet places. Usually the barn funnel weavers prey on P. vagans, which are smaller.
> “But in the cave, because it’s dark in there, our hypothesis was that they do not see each other,” Blerina Vrenozi, a biologist, zoologist and ecologist at the University of Tirana in Albania said in an interview. “So they do not attack.”
I thought one of the major purposes of spiderwebs was that the spider can detect the presence of something else in the web without needing to be able to see it.
OMG, thats look so terrifying and amazing at the same time
This NYT article opens with a video showing the web and some explanatory text.
The archive.today copy doesn't play the video. The thumbnail image is present. The <video> tag is present on the archived page, but its src attribute has been renamed to "old-src". Re-renaming the old-src attribute back to "src" will cause the video to play, but at that point you're playing the original non-archived video directly from nyt.com. This will presumably break if NYT takes the video down.
Does archive.today not archive videos?
The Wraith have arrived!
Anyone that watched Stargate Atlantis gets it.
Odd use of the word 'pastiche'
"The wider web is actually a pastiche of thousands of individual funnel-shaped webs,"
On planet earth — population 8.3 billion — were apes that had not been known to live together harmoniously, having previously thought to be hostile to each other.
I’d be careful - this spider web may be a gateway to Upside Down. Let’s just cement the whole cave just in case.
>Usually the barn funnel weavers prey on P. vagans, which are smaller.
>“But in the cave, because it’s dark in there, our hypothesis was that they do not see each other,”
Will they start fighting one another now lights are being shone on them?
"The cave is full of hydrogen sulphide gas in too high concentrations for most animals to survive"
Over a shot of a bunch of people walking around with no masks on?
I once had an apartment in an old building. The building had high ceilings and equally high wood frame windows. The windows were drafty and had visible gaps to the outside. As winter approached, and nights grew colder I set out to cover the windows with plastic film (common here for this purpose).
While preparing one window in the bedroom I discovered a silken patch like a miniature of the one depicted in this article. I used my cleaning rag to wipe it away thinking any inhabitants had long since moved on. To my surprise a wisp tiny spiders scurried away from my swipe, disappearing into crevices, the base board, and carpet. Startled and not seeing any to kill, I bid them farewell, in my mind assuring myself they had moved on.
That same day or the next a cold wave came through and I lied awake in bed listening to the plastic I had applied rustle from the wind. The window gaps were bigger than I’d thought. Falling into a fitful sleep under not quite adequate blankets, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my lower leg! I jumped out of bed, turned a light, and found upon examination three red punctures on my left calf. Recalling the spiders from the day before I shook out my blankets and bed sheets. I checked below the bed. Nothing, I never found the culprits.
After sleeping that night on the couch, I awoke late the next. I felt feverish and disoriented. The wounds on my calf had become inflamed. The cold in the apartment added to my discomfort.
The next few days were a blur. I missed work and the few social engagements I had planned. Eventually the wounds began to heal but I was still bone cold and the light from windows hurt my eyes. Winter has set in and the plastic I’d applied to the windows had detached from the wind allowing icy drafts into the apartment. I diligently applied another layer of plastic on the windows, this time using packing tape to secure the corners!
It was a harsh winter and I repeated this process several times until the windows were opaque and along with the shades allowing very little light through.
One day as I sat in the dark slowly eating my meal there was a knock on the door. It was my close friend from work wondering what had happened to me. I must have been a sight judging from his startled appearance.
Summer came and I emerged occasionally to acquire food and other necessities only to scurry back home when the outside became too overwhelming. I eventually found remote work, and here I am today in my cold dark apartment with high ceilings and drafty windows.
Note if you made it to the end, thanks for indulging me. This is based on a real apartment, windows and spiders!
Run
Non-paywall link from a previous submission when there were numerous posts about this without discussion: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/science/biggest-spiderweb...
The headline is very Trumpian
... excuse me while I Nope! TF out
https://archive.ph/25NVv
Some other stories about it that got no traction here: https://www.livescience.com/animals/spiders/worlds-biggest-s..., https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worlds-largest-sp...