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 feel like a lot of the pro-spider replies have never accidentally disturbed or stepped on a momma wolf spider carrying her babies on back and witnessed the pure terror that ensues as hundreds of babies swarm out across your floor.
Yeah same, we do not bother spiders in the house unless they jump into bed or on food or whatever, and then we just take them outside. With spiders and cats in the house we never see any flies or other insects.
I have a rule with the spiders where if they get too bold they get the vacuum. I don't mind them lurking in the corners but I don't want them crawling across my desk. I think most of them understand the arrangement by now. Only occasional enforcement is necessary.
I tried this with a yellowjacket and a screamer of a Shop Vac that has a six-foot hose. I was sure it would have suffocated from the dust inside the vacuum bag clogging its spiracles.
Next morning, the wasp (now with tattered wings) was sitting in the corner of a window. I have no idea how it made it out.
It's probably a pretty natural path for the wasp assuming it survived the initial time you were running the vac. The shopvac is just a big container with at the top an exit path following the wall naturally out the tube. They don't even tend to have a flap like smaller hand vacs might have to keep dust from falling out during use.
I feel guilty when I take down the webs. Wool dusters work as well as the vac.
Lately I have been trying to get macro photos of spiders hanging on their threads and so far failing because they see the camera and drop down a foot before I can set up the shot.
Incidentally, this method cured me of arachnophobia. Having it trapped inside the glass, yet in my hand and up close to take a closer look, allowed me to gradually see them as not all that scary. It's like that therapy where you gradually get closer to the thing you're afraid of (desensitization?).
I deal with trespassing flies this way. They spend some time in fly jail (butterfly net, twisted closed and propped against the door frame through which they entered) pour encourager les autres, then they go free outside at dusk.
Pheromones, interpretive dance, telepathy,—I don’t know exactly how the others get the message but I know that they do, and they stay on the correct side of the doorway.
I've never really understood the "spiders protect you from pests" argument. Yeah, sure they eat flies. But I'd much rather have a fly buzz past me and get stuck to some fly paper than have a spider drop from the door frame on an invisible silk thread and slam into my face, or run across my pillow. Maybe I have arachnophobia, but they're freaky little creatures that I don't want in my living space.
> than have a spider drop from the door frame on an invisible silk thread and slam into my face, or run across my pillow
Rare if ever happens. Maybe 5 times in your life time. I will pay that cost any day. I have made friends with spiders. Flies spread diseases, spiders eat them. Spiders seldom bite humans and when they do, it’s nowhere near as bad as getting scratched by a cat.
For what it's worth, it happens to me about 5 times each summer. But I also welcome spiders as pest control, so it's not a surprise, and I forget all about it 5 seconds later.
Suit yourself, I'd much rather have the latter. One of the best features of spiders is that they can't fly. If a bug can fly, all bets are off. Who knows where that thing is going to end up. Spiders are at least more predictable.
I've never been prevented from sleep by a spider buzzing around the room, either.
I don't mind spiders at all, they mostly stay out of my way. Flies, on the other hand, land on my food, buzz around the room when I want to sleep, and are generally a nuisance.
I saw a butterfly get stuck to a web once. It immediately started hurling itself violently away, trying to shake itself free. The spider was not immediately in evidence.
I managed to take the web off it, but not without tearing off the part of the wing that made contact. I assume that in the butterfly's best-case scenario, that would have happened anyway. It was able to fly afterwards.
My house has a problem with little black ants that pest control services never could quite take care of. Spiders kept trying to set up shop near a window, but I would always knock the web down. Once I relented and let the spiders do their thing my ant problem went away. All I need to do is clean up a few ant corpses in the fall, which is a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
That's how I feel about dragonflies. Spiders are, to me, equally interesting but less enjoyable. I tolerate a few spiders in our house, but not in bedrooms or the kitchen.
It's actually spider webs that protect you from pests. The webs keep catching bugs as long as they are there, the spider just eats what it wants then moves on.
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.
> 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!
From the livescience article linked by another poster: biofilm produced by sulfur-eating bacteria, which in turn metabolize sulfur from the sulfur-rich stream in the cave.
So the whole food-chain here is: sulfur -> bacteria -> midges -> spiders.
> The environment, too, is unusually protected. The cave is hard to reach and is filled with foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas, in concentrations too great for most animals to live there.
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.
> "Stable isotope analyses (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N) revealed that the trophic web sustaining this assemblage is fueled by in situ primary production from sulfur-oxidizing microbial biofilms then transferred through chironomid larvae and adults to higher trophic levels."
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.
Also, this web is so dense it looks like a solid sheet of silk, studded with the remains of its past victims. Wouldn't that be a little too conspicuous? I thought spider webs were supposed to be nearly invisible to the prey.
Cave-dwelling animals don't just crash into walls all the time, so by "visible" I mean large enough and dense enough to be recognized as an obstacle in whatever navigation system they use.
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.
They produce the goods that we consume. We are the ones working in their marketing department, building their online stores, streamlining consumption. Then we go home and buy stuff we don't need.
The productive capacity for the goods we consume was built by average people. Billionaires only exist to skim off the top, and are not a required component of the process.
Honey, wake up, we’re living in the finance capitalism era. Also in this part of history, the majority of the goods you consume are NOT produced by your overlords. The goods are produced by labour. Not by speculation or by private ownership of the means of production.
It's odd, in a way — when you have a well-paying job, you have nothing from an accounting viewpoint and the owners of the organisation have a valuable asset. The skill that you contribute to the organisation is accounted for as a financial asset belonging to someone else. There are good reasons for that, the accounting viewpoint makes sense for accounting purposes.
In everyday parlance we say that you have a job and you have the skill, and in reality you actually are free to take your skill elsewhere. Your skill plays a part in the market value of your employer, but you stay or leave at your whim, the "owner" of the "asset" doesn't decide.
Those billions are IMO mostly an accounting fiction — it's better to think of it in the way that our ordinary language suggests, where your actions are yours, your skills are yours, etc. If you drive to work, that's your emissions based on your choice, it's not a choice made by someone whose great wealth is mostly an assessment of your skill and earning power.
If you build a house and need some concrete for that, CO₂ is emitted in a concrete factory, but I think it's better to regard the emitted CO₂ as a choice made by you than as emissions by the billionaire who owns the factory. Even if the accountants assess the value of the factory as a large number.
Trillions of dollars worth of propaganda, lobbying & outright bribery, regulatory capture, psychological social conditioning etc say Americans don't stand a chance to change the status quo. These things are set in motion empirically, you have got to understand.
No, the average US citizen destroys the planet. They would too if the economy was owned by large corporations owned by the state. Which is almost the same now that the country is run by oligarchs.
Not sure if you'd count it as social, but the dancing spiders certainly put effort into courtship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qkzwG2lLPcPeacock spiders, dance for your life! - BBC
I've seen old brick wall with a lot of funnel of spiders. (I'm not sure it's the exact same specie of spider.) They were close, but not in contact of each other IIRC. I guess when there is not enough room they get use to have neighbors and then evolution makes them less grumpy.
Although, in terms of numbers, according to that Wikipedia: “Several permutations of social behavior exist amongst the 23 species of spider considered to be quasi-social out of some 45,000 known species of spider”
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.
> 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.
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 can easily identify pretty much anything that causes a wind current near them, and most all species can easily identify prey by the distinct vibrations they make once caught in the web.
If you watch most spiders, however, they can occasionally be fooled on windy day when a leaf or other detritus hits their webs, and they have to go touch it to find out it isn't prey. Eyesight just isn't a thing most are great with.
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.
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.
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.
> “All you could smell was sulfur hydrogen, and you cannot breathe,” Dr. Vrenozi said, recalling that most of the researchers were wearing masks. But as they descended deeper into the cave, she said that “you get used to the smell of spoiled eggs.”
Also, you use "" but you are not quoting, the text inside your quotes does not exist in the article. The actual quote would be
> The cave is hard to reach and is filled with foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas, in concentrations too great for most animals to live there.
Getting used to the smell could be an extremely bad sign, in fact.
With hydrogen sulfide, olfactory fatigue can occur at 100 ppm, and paralysis of the olfactory nerve has been reported at 150 ppm[1]. Those levels are considered "immediately dangerous to life and health (level that interferes with the ability to escape)"[3]
So you might think the gas is gone or that you're "used to it", but you're being poisoned and are at risk of losing consciousness and dying.
However, according to [2], "the atmosphere in [Sulfur Cave] can reach concentrations of up to 14 ppm of H2S". According to [4] that's below the "acceptable ceiling concentration" of 20 ppm, with up to 50 ppm for a 10-minute period being acceptable for an 8-hour shift. So these levels are in the "not great, not terrible" category. Wearing a mask is highly advisable.
Yes, that was my thought as well. As a youthful experimenter, I once did not clean up properly after myself and stopped smelling the H2S which was permeating the room (Back then, the recipe for H2S was in chapter 1 of the Chemistry sets. Good times!)
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 link too.
>Acute inhalation exposure to high concentrations may result in collapse, respiratory paralysis, cyanosis, convulsions, coma, cardiac arrhythmias, and death within minutes.
>Exposure to low concentrations may irritate the eyes and respiratory tract, resulting in sore throat, cough, and dyspnoea.
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!
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...
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 feel like a lot of the pro-spider replies have never accidentally disturbed or stepped on a momma wolf spider carrying her babies on back and witnessed the pure terror that ensues as hundreds of babies swarm out across your floor.
Yeah same, we do not bother spiders in the house unless they jump into bed or on food or whatever, and then we just take them outside. With spiders and cats in the house we never see any flies or other insects.
I have a rule with the spiders where if they get too bold they get the vacuum. I don't mind them lurking in the corners but I don't want them crawling across my desk. I think most of them understand the arrangement by now. Only occasional enforcement is necessary.
I tried this with a yellowjacket and a screamer of a Shop Vac that has a six-foot hose. I was sure it would have suffocated from the dust inside the vacuum bag clogging its spiracles.
Next morning, the wasp (now with tattered wings) was sitting in the corner of a window. I have no idea how it made it out.
It's probably a pretty natural path for the wasp assuming it survived the initial time you were running the vac. The shopvac is just a big container with at the top an exit path following the wall naturally out the tube. They don't even tend to have a flap like smaller hand vacs might have to keep dust from falling out during use.
Use glass and a paper sheet, much easier and less harsh on the "bugs".
I don't find that any easier, and generally don't care about insect welfare.
I feel guilty when I take down the webs. Wool dusters work as well as the vac.
Lately I have been trying to get macro photos of spiders hanging on their threads and so far failing because they see the camera and drop down a foot before I can set up the shot.
I'm sure putting it outside makes you feel better but it's a death sentence regardless for most house spiders to be put into the outdoors.
Why?
This was my exact arrangement with them when I used to live in a basement suite that was crawling with them.
glass and piece of card, come on!
Incidentally, this method cured me of arachnophobia. Having it trapped inside the glass, yet in my hand and up close to take a closer look, allowed me to gradually see them as not all that scary. It's like that therapy where you gradually get closer to the thing you're afraid of (desensitization?).
I like to think of them as little robots, however I still need to get my partner to move them.
I think it’s their speed which I don’t like!
THIS. You can then also show the spider to the kids for added interest before releasing it into the wild.
The point is to send a message to the other spiders.
I deal with trespassing flies this way. They spend some time in fly jail (butterfly net, twisted closed and propped against the door frame through which they entered) pour encourager les autres, then they go free outside at dusk.
Pheromones, interpretive dance, telepathy,—I don’t know exactly how the others get the message but I know that they do, and they stay on the correct side of the doorway.
I've never really understood the "spiders protect you from pests" argument. Yeah, sure they eat flies. But I'd much rather have a fly buzz past me and get stuck to some fly paper than have a spider drop from the door frame on an invisible silk thread and slam into my face, or run across my pillow. Maybe I have arachnophobia, but they're freaky little creatures that I don't want in my living space.
> than have a spider drop from the door frame on an invisible silk thread and slam into my face, or run across my pillow
Rare if ever happens. Maybe 5 times in your life time. I will pay that cost any day. I have made friends with spiders. Flies spread diseases, spiders eat them. Spiders seldom bite humans and when they do, it’s nowhere near as bad as getting scratched by a cat.
For what it's worth, it happens to me about 5 times each summer. But I also welcome spiders as pest control, so it's not a surprise, and I forget all about it 5 seconds later.
You should make friends with Canadian spiders then. They are very polite. I don’t remember the last time I got bit :)
beware the canadian amnesia spider
Suit yourself, I'd much rather have the latter. One of the best features of spiders is that they can't fly. If a bug can fly, all bets are off. Who knows where that thing is going to end up. Spiders are at least more predictable.
I've never been prevented from sleep by a spider buzzing around the room, either.
I don't mind spiders at all, they mostly stay out of my way. Flies, on the other hand, land on my food, buzz around the room when I want to sleep, and are generally a nuisance.
> I'd much rather have a fly buzz past me
Ever wonder where those flies have been? Maybe on some nice smelly garbage, and then on your food or your dishes. Flies carry diseases, man.
> and get stuck to some fly paper
Glue traps are cruel.
Aren't spider webs kind of like glue traps
The spider quickly kills the prey. Glue traps don’t.
They paralyze them and wrap them up till they want to eat them which can be days later.
I saw a butterfly get stuck to a web once. It immediately started hurling itself violently away, trying to shake itself free. The spider was not immediately in evidence.
I managed to take the web off it, but not without tearing off the part of the wing that made contact. I assume that in the butterfly's best-case scenario, that would have happened anyway. It was able to fly afterwards.
Now try to save a butterfly from a glue trap.
No.
This is the first anti-fly paper take I've ever seen on the basis of morality.
I said glue traps in general are cruel. Google it.
https://www.peta.org/issues/wildlife/wildlife-factsheets/glu...
My house has a problem with little black ants that pest control services never could quite take care of. Spiders kept trying to set up shop near a window, but I would always knock the web down. Once I relented and let the spiders do their thing my ant problem went away. All I need to do is clean up a few ant corpses in the fall, which is a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
They eat the creatures who want to eat you. Like beautiful guardian angels
That's how I feel about dragonflies. Spiders are, to me, equally interesting but less enjoyable. I tolerate a few spiders in our house, but not in bedrooms or the kitchen.
It's actually spider webs that protect you from pests. The webs keep catching bugs as long as they are there, the spider just eats what it wants then moves on.
Mosquitos and flies are much more harmful than spiders.
We have a lot of spiders and yet they don't seem to do much about the silverfish. :(
They do hunt millipedes and then drag the corpses back to their lair to form a millipede graveyard.
Silverfish are one of the few insects grosser than any spider, even the way they scuttle is revolting.
I'm more offended by the fact that they eat books and bookbinding glue.
In this case, it’s more on us to not break their house rules when we visit their cave.
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.
Not a problem at all, they have a midge budget to fix it with their chitin.
Strangely reminiscent of "Children of Time"'s beginnings of spider intelligence
I read that book blind recently. Did not expect the spiders, but ended up liking those chapters the most.
I came here to mention the same book.
This is fascinating. My first question would be what are they catching?
What can sustain that number of spiders so far underground?
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!
From the livescience article linked by another poster: biofilm produced by sulfur-eating bacteria, which in turn metabolize sulfur from the sulfur-rich stream in the cave.
So the whole food-chain here is: sulfur -> bacteria -> midges -> spiders.
Seems like a great place for spider-eating frogs to move into.
> The environment, too, is unusually protected. The cave is hard to reach and is filled with foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas, in concentrations too great for most animals to live there.
I don't know why she swallowed a\ f\l\y\ rotten eggs.
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 chemoautotrophy")
> "Stable isotope analyses (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N) revealed that the trophic web sustaining this assemblage is fueled by in situ primary production from sulfur-oxidizing microbial biofilms then transferred through chironomid larvae and adults to higher trophic levels."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent
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.
Also, this web is so dense it looks like a solid sheet of silk, studded with the remains of its past victims. Wouldn't that be a little too conspicuous? I thought spider webs were supposed to be nearly invisible to the prey.
Well the article claims cave is pitch dark, so I guess the invisible part is granted anyway.
Cave-dwelling animals don't just crash into walls all the time, so by "visible" I mean large enough and dense enough to be recognized as an obstacle in whatever navigation system they use.
They do rest on walls though.
In this case every part of the wall is actually just a spiderweb.
Every part of Earth's crust is jam packed with life.
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.
Creating a whole lot of them too.
Something as simple as a bakery is amazing.
Not "we", it's the billionaires.
They produce the goods that we consume. We are the ones working in their marketing department, building their online stores, streamlining consumption. Then we go home and buy stuff we don't need.
They only "produce" anything in an abstract economic sense.
The productive capacity for the goods we consume was built by average people. Billionaires only exist to skim off the top, and are not a required component of the process.
What does this have to do with the discussion?
Refusing the above claim that billionaires produce the "goods that we consume".
Honey, wake up, we’re living in the finance capitalism era. Also in this part of history, the majority of the goods you consume are NOT produced by your overlords. The goods are produced by labour. Not by speculation or by private ownership of the means of production.
Starting a comment with honey does not prime the reader for polite conversation. Mind the HN guidelines.
It’s a pretty common meme template. It shouldn’t prime a reader for impolite conversation, especially given the HN guidelines.
My gas fired central heating is set to 20 degrees C. So if not 'you', then definitely 'me'!
If money wasn't an issue both of you can replace whatever polluting heating solution you have with a more environmentally-friendly one.
It should be surprising that so few people are willing to acknowledge this. Unfortunately, it's not.
It's odd, in a way — when you have a well-paying job, you have nothing from an accounting viewpoint and the owners of the organisation have a valuable asset. The skill that you contribute to the organisation is accounted for as a financial asset belonging to someone else. There are good reasons for that, the accounting viewpoint makes sense for accounting purposes.
In everyday parlance we say that you have a job and you have the skill, and in reality you actually are free to take your skill elsewhere. Your skill plays a part in the market value of your employer, but you stay or leave at your whim, the "owner" of the "asset" doesn't decide.
Those billions are IMO mostly an accounting fiction — it's better to think of it in the way that our ordinary language suggests, where your actions are yours, your skills are yours, etc. If you drive to work, that's your emissions based on your choice, it's not a choice made by someone whose great wealth is mostly an assessment of your skill and earning power.
If you build a house and need some concrete for that, CO₂ is emitted in a concrete factory, but I think it's better to regard the emitted CO₂ as a choice made by you than as emissions by the billionaire who owns the factory. Even if the accountants assess the value of the factory as a large number.
Who gave them billions of dollars?
Trillions of dollars worth of propaganda, lobbying & outright bribery, regulatory capture, psychological social conditioning etc say Americans don't stand a chance to change the status quo. These things are set in motion empirically, you have got to understand.
Trillions of dollars regular folks purchases produces billionaires.
No, the average US citizen destroys the planet. They would too if the economy was owned by large corporations owned by the state. Which is almost the same now that the country is run by oligarchs.
Don't worry, AI will be nice for some reason.
We are another invasive species I guess.
Spiders are super solitary creatures. I wonder, though, if they could become social.
You might enjoy the book Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Or maybe A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
Or maybe Web (1979) by John Wyndham.
Or maybe Charlotte's Web by E. B. White.
The perfect thread and comment to recommend this book!
It begins!
Not sure if you'd count it as social, but the dancing spiders certainly put effort into courtship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qkzwG2lLPc Peacock spiders, dance for your life! - BBC
I've seen old brick wall with a lot of funnel of spiders. (I'm not sure it's the exact same specie of spider.) They were close, but not in contact of each other IIRC. I guess when there is not enough room they get use to have neighbors and then evolution makes them less grumpy.
There are hundreds of species of social spiders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_spider
Wow, thank you! I obviously had no idea!
Although, in terms of numbers, according to that Wikipedia: “Several permutations of social behavior exist amongst the 23 species of spider considered to be quasi-social out of some 45,000 known species of spider”
Impressive that there's a wiki article on precisely that topic.
There's youtube of: The Process of Making Friends With a Tiny Spider https://youtu.be/i6ucE1cfzmE
All went to the cave to get away from everything
Oh, to be a spider eating 2.4 million midges
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?
The article mentions that the caves are filled with millions of midges providing plenty of food.
I think they're referring to the spiders that are deep in the web, since the midges presumably don't make it that deep
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.
They may have more chances to change their skin unnoticed in the silent place.
> 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.
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 can easily identify pretty much anything that causes a wind current near them, and most all species can easily identify prey by the distinct vibrations they make once caught in the web.
If you watch most spiders, however, they can occasionally be fooled on windy day when a leaf or other detritus hits their webs, and they have to go touch it to find out it isn't prey. Eyesight just isn't a thing most are great with.
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.
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.
If some spiders of these two species are going to find new home without dark, will they continue to be friends?
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?
enough good is to archive everything except videos
The Wraith have arrived!
Anyone that watched Stargate Atlantis gets it.
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.
Odd use of the word 'pastiche'
"The wider web is actually a pastiche of thousands of individual funnel-shaped webs,"
"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?
Read a bit further, the very next sentence???
> “All you could smell was sulfur hydrogen, and you cannot breathe,” Dr. Vrenozi said, recalling that most of the researchers were wearing masks. But as they descended deeper into the cave, she said that “you get used to the smell of spoiled eggs.”
Also, you use "" but you are not quoting, the text inside your quotes does not exist in the article. The actual quote would be
> The cave is hard to reach and is filled with foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas, in concentrations too great for most animals to live there.
Getting used to the smell doesn't mean it's safe though... And isn't the safe level of hydrogen sulphide "if you can smell it, its not safe"?
Getting used to the smell could be an extremely bad sign, in fact.
With hydrogen sulfide, olfactory fatigue can occur at 100 ppm, and paralysis of the olfactory nerve has been reported at 150 ppm[1]. Those levels are considered "immediately dangerous to life and health (level that interferes with the ability to escape)"[3]
So you might think the gas is gone or that you're "used to it", but you're being poisoned and are at risk of losing consciousness and dying.
However, according to [2], "the atmosphere in [Sulfur Cave] can reach concentrations of up to 14 ppm of H2S". According to [4] that's below the "acceptable ceiling concentration" of 20 ppm, with up to 50 ppm for a 10-minute period being acceptable for an 8-hour shift. So these levels are in the "not great, not terrible" category. Wearing a mask is highly advisable.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK208170/
[2] https://subtbiol.pensoft.net/article/162344/
[3] https://www.osha.gov/hydrogen-sulfide/hazards
[4] https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19...
Yes, that was my thought as well. As a youthful experimenter, I once did not clean up properly after myself and stopped smelling the H2S which was permeating the room (Back then, the recipe for H2S was in chapter 1 of the Chemistry sets. Good times!)
No longer noticing the smell is NOT a good thing!
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 link too.
It's the lower third at [0:28](https://vp.nyt.com/video/2025/11/07/154186_1_07vid-spider-we...) in the video.
Effects of hydrogen sulphide:
>Acute inhalation exposure to high concentrations may result in collapse, respiratory paralysis, cyanosis, convulsions, coma, cardiac arrhythmias, and death within minutes.
>Exposure to low concentrations may irritate the eyes and respiratory tract, resulting in sore throat, cough, and dyspnoea.
I guess they were at the low end.
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?
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!
I'd read a short story or a novella written by you. Hope it was not LLMd.
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