To reach a system of caves along the Greece-Albania border, biologists had to ford waist-deep water smelling of sulfur and bat poop. Then they made their way through pitch-black tunnels thick with clouds of midge-flies. It was worth the effort, though. They found the world’s largest spider web. “I’ve been working for 18 years with spiders, and I’ve never seen such a community,” Blerina Vrenozi told The New York Times. She's a biologist at Albania’s University of Tirana. She was part of the team that found the web. The 1,140-square-foot web is home to roughly 110,000 spiders. They coated the cavern walls in inches-thick silk. The sheer amount of spiders living on the web is a big deal on its own. They normally prefer to live on their own. But what makes the massive colony truly unique, experts say, is that the spiders are from two different species. “So often if you have spiders in close vicinity, they will fight and end up eating each other,” biologist Lena Grinsted told The Associated Press. But she also noted that spiders tend to fight less when there is plenty of food around. The two spider species that spun the web are barn funnel weavers and the smaller sheet weavers. In this case, experts think, they evolved to cohabitate thanks to the estimated 2.4 million midges buzzing throughout the cave. All that food took away the need to compete. The pitch-black darkness likely played a role as well. “They do not see each other, so they do not attack,” Vrenozi explained. Put all of it together and you have a recipe for one massive web. Vrenozi’s team published its findings on the cave in the journal Subterranean Biology. Reflect: How do you react when you discover something surprising or unfamiliar in nature? Photo of cave explorer standing next to a large spider web at Sulfur Cave on the Greece-Albania border from Reuters.
