Giant Spider Web
August 31, 2007
By GRETEL C. KOVACH
WILLS POINT, Tex., Aug. 29 — Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors.
Sheets of web have encased several mature oak trees and are thick enough in places to block out the sun along a nature trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near this town about 50 miles east of Dallas.
The gossamer strands, slowly overtaking a lakefront peninsula, emit a fetid odor, perhaps from the dead insects entwined in the silk. The web whines with the sound of countless mosquitoes and flies trapped in its folds.
(This story was No.1 on the list of most emailed stories from that day's edition of the New York Times, and it was the lead story in the Nation section of the print edition...)
The link includes pictures and studies of the web.
http://texasento.net/Social_Spider.htm
Here's a direct link to a photo
http://media.star-telegram.com/Multi...tos/Bigweb.jpg