Natural rebalancing?

[boozymatic]

Mother Nature copes with situations in her own special way.

Apparently the flooding in Pakistan last year has had some interesting effects on the local flora and fauna. The photos of trees wrapped in spiderwebs are fascinating, and, well, slightly disturbing to me. You see, spiders don't like water, so they crawled up into the trees to wait out

Comments

[wobblerlorri]

It's actually very IN balance! There are probably an overabundance of flying insects, prey items for the spiders, which has led to a sort of cooperative effort on the part of the spiders.

Normally when a spider's egg case hatches, the baby spiders disperse with the winds, and they'll eat each other if they land too close together. When there's an overabundance of food, they won't eat each other, and they sort of live in cooperative communities.

I saw some show on National Geographic about this, which explained it.

[lynedd]

BC spiders will do this sometimes in seasons with abundant rainfall. X-files did an episode around this effect in one of the earliest seasons - entire fields of blueberry bushes shrouded in spiderweb.

Cool, but creepy P)