Odd use of the word 'pastiche'
"The wider web is actually a pastiche of thousands of individual funnel-shaped webs,"
A spider web unlike any seen before
131–140 of 156 posts
Re: A spider web unlike any seen before
#132I 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.
Not a problem at all, they have a midge budget to fix it with their chitin.
Re: A spider web unlike any seen before
#133If some spiders of these two species are going to find new home without dark, will they continue to be friends?
Re: A spider web unlike any seen before
#134What 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?
They may have more chances to change their skin unnoticed in the silent place.
Re: A spider web unlike any seen before
#135What 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?
midges can fly, so presumably they would hit the web at random points. as to why flying would be useful for the midges, if they consume biofilms on the surfaces, that's less clear. perhaps over time the midges will evolve away from flying and the spiders will have to adjust their strategy.
Re: A spider web unlike any seen before
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are right. If I remember there were 2 types of silk, and they could use their legs to “listen” to vibrations when something gets caught anywhere in the web. They seem to avoid getting stuck in their own webs. But they do have 8 eyes, so I’m assuming they make visual confirmation. But these cave spiders are in the dark…
Depending upon the species, spiders can make more types of silk: strong, soft, sticking, sensing, etc. Most spiders have terrible eyesight despite having eight eyes. Those with good eyesight are jumping spiders, portia, and a few ground spiders. These species are easily distinguished by having two large front-facing eyes. Due to bad eyesight, most spiders use touch through their webs and/or hairs. The hirsute species…
Most of spiders I tried to fool can't be fooled by a leaf, they usually wait for recurring vibrations. Touching the web by a stick never produces enough good vibration to attract the spider. Baiting to things on the web is mostly about young spiders, the biggest spiders I have seen on their webs usually kind of lazy.
Re: A spider web unlike any seen before
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the glut of conventional food leaves the prospect of eating their compatriots less appetizing.
Probably not; these aren't closely related spiders. It would be like a human eating a monkey, which is something humans like doing. But if the smaller spiders can fight back at all, it might well make that battle less appealing.
Spider fight is wrestling about who does the one shot one hit, they do not hit or puncture in other in order to make just a mechanical damage.
Re: A spider web unlike any seen before
#138This 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 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. Th…
enough good is to archive everything except videos
Re: A spider web unlike any seen before
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article: > The vast spider population is attributed to an abundant food supply: more than 2.4 million midges in the cave, ready to be entangled in the intricate web. ...although I guess the question then is what sustains the millions of midges!
That's the interesting part! (And which the submitted NYT story regrettably neglects). It's a chemoautotrophic ecosystem[0] largely independent of the sun, and of photosynthetic life. Akin to hydrothermal vents[1] in the ocean, and the lifeforms that eat that effluent. [0] https://subtbiol.pensoft.net/article/162344/ ( "An extraordinary colonial spider community in Sulfur Cave (Albania/Greece) sustained by chemoautot…
It is a chemoautotrophic system, but it is not independent of the sun and of photosynthetic life.
This is a hugely erroneous claim that is much too frequently encountered in the popular publications.
Both in this cave and in hydrothermal vents, most autotrophic bacteria use free oxygen to oxidize the hydrogen sulfide, producing thus the energy needed for autotrophy.
The free oxygen comes from the phototrophic algae and plants (located elsewhere), i.e. from solar energy.
On Earth, there are only 2 kinds of autotrophic bacteria and archaea that may be independent from solar energy, the acetogenic bacteria and archaea and the methanogenic archaea. Both kinds obtain energy from free hydrogen and carbon dioxide, the former producing acetic acid and the latter producing methane.
These 2 kinds of bacteria and archaea need free hydrogen and most of them are killed by free oxygen. Sometimes the free hydrogen is produced by fermentation of organic substances, like in our intestines, so also coming from solar energy, but free hydrogen is also produced by the oxidation of volcanic rocks by water, when its origin is independent of solar energy and dependent only on the internal heat of the Earth, which produces volcanic rocks that are in chemical equilibrium at high temperatures deep inside the Earth's mantle, but they are no longer in chemical equilibrium after reaching the cold surface of the Earth.
Thus deep underground or in certain places on the bottom of the oceans, where free dihydrogen is abundant and there exists no free dioxygen, there are communities of acetogenic and methanogenic bacteria and archaea that are independent of solar energy, but this is not the case for this cave and for many of the hydrothermal vents, where both hydrogen sulfide and free dioxygen are abundant, so aerobic bacteria are dominant.
Anywhere where there is either air or water with dissolved dioxygen, the living beings use the most efficient energy source, i.e. the oxidation of either organic or anorganic substances with the free dioxygen, so they depend on solar energy, even when there is no light in that place.
Re: A spider web unlike any seen before
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was quoting the caption in one of the images at the top, not the article itself
Before replying I searched the entire page and did not find your quote anywhere, including the captions. To make sure I did not miss anything I even only searched for a single word from your quote, "hydrogen", then "animals", and there are only three (two) places in the text, none in the captions. I'm not sure if NYT articles are known to change their images and captions for different viewers? I checked the archived…
It's the lower third at [0:28](https://vp.nyt.com/video/2025/11/07/154186_1_07vid-spider-we...) in the video.