Filmed in South Yorkshire. The YouTube comments plumb the depths of ignorance; it's too bad such people can't see the everyday awesomeness of the natural world.
Via Nothing to do with Arbroath.
Addendum: A tip of the hat to an anonymous reader, who in response to my query in the Comment thread asking why this happens, offered a link to a Metabunk post on this subject which has several embedded videos and photos. The discussion indicates that these confluent areas are indeed of arachnid origin, but may not be "webs" in the traditional sense. Rather they may arise from silk spun for "ballooning" (travel) purposes (I probably should change the title of the post):
...there are approximately one million of spiders per acre, (nearly a billion spiders in a square mile) and occasionally a large number of spiders will take to the air ar the same time (probably due to hatching at the same time based on weather conditions). The masses of silk will coat fields, get caught in trees, and sometimes get tangled up and blown into the air...
It was only relatively recently (the 1700s) that people realized the "gossamer" that sometimes coats fields actually came from spider, and was thought to come from evaporated dew...
This silk is not particularly sticky (spiders can spin both sticky and non-sticky silk). But is very light and thin, and when rolled in your fingers it will collapse upon itself, resulting in just a few specks. This can be mis-interpreted as "dissolving", but really it just that the silk occupies very little space to start out with. The silk used for flying is known as "gossamer" silk, and is one the lightest and thinnest of all types of spider silk.
I don't understand what it is.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like some sort of frost or frozen fog.
DeleteConspiracy theorist see this as remnants of chemtrails--chock full of gamma radiation. To the rest of us, it's plain old spider webs.
Deleteshibori is correct. See for example this one in Australia -
Deletehttp://io9.com/5891091/massive-spiderwebs-engulf-australian-town-as-arachnids-escape-floods
In this case the mist/fog accentuates the phenomenon by making it visible.
Yes, it isn't clearly explained in an accent that I can understand, and I now don't want to look on youtube to find the answer somewhere in the comments! But I think, from the part when the camera dips next to the ground and it looks like the view into a fish tank, that it is dew and then fog that has been frozen.
ReplyDeleteI guess you don't walk on your lawn barefoot in Yorkshire.
ReplyDeleteWhat you are seeing is a large scale spider web composed of thousands (millions?) of ground spiders whose web combined to make one solid sheet over the field.
ReplyDeleteI would have loved to take a stick and roll it along the ground and see just how much silk I could collect going across that field.
Any idea, Bill, about why this behavior would occur? It doesn't seem that it would be particularly necessary or efficient re catching the available prey.
DeleteThere is a good article on this here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.metabunk.org/threads/debunked-chemwebs-chemtrail-cobweb-fibers-are-from-ballooning-spiders.287/
It appears that people were confused by this phenomenon hundreds of years ago, as much as they are now.
You are quite right that that this phenomenon has been known for a long time. Even Shakespeare, whoever he was :), knew of "gossamer".
DeleteInteresting. I suppose this is the "arriving" part of their journey where their silk balloons all touch down near one another. It would be very interesting to have a photo of them all departing en mass.
ReplyDeleteThis article indicates that they may engage in this behavior not just due to an accident of birth, but also possibly because they are all fleeing from the site of the same natural disaster / disturbance. In that case a flood.