By Jim Stanford on October 12, 2007
Had a few spindly visitors drop by lately? Noticed all the backlit web strands floating in the sky around Snow King?
It’s a phenomenon called “ballooning spiders,” and apparently it’s how the newly hatched insects escape before one of their siblings eats them.
Conditions have been particularly ripe this fall for the arachnids’ aerial assault.
The spiderlings spray liquid silk into the air, and as the web strand forms, it catches the wind and carries them away. Baby spiders can travel hundreds of miles in the air in this way, even landing on offshore islands.
On Tuesday the spiders were everywhere around Jackson, dropping from trees and stringing webs across the Cache Creek and Sink or Swim trails.
After being covered in strands on leaving the house the other day, I phoned naturalist guru Bert Raynes to find out what the hell was going on.
“You’re out of your mind,” he said. “Are you on some hallucinating drug?”
The invasion hasn’t been limited to Wyoming. Eight-legged hitchhikers also have been turning up en masse in Oklahoma, arousing the curiosity of a student newspaper.
The paper attributed the abundance of webs this fall to heavy rains, which may explain why Jackson experienced a similar explosion following a week of wet weather.
Or perhaps there’s a good crop of hallucinogenic drugs.
Posted under environment, wildlife
Talked to an old Jackson salt who said last time this happened he thought was 10yrs ago. Same phenom for a few days.
Spider on!
Kid kreplach
A friend passed this along over the weekend.
I got bit a few times last week, and the marks were bigger than a mosquito bite — more like a zit gone awry.
All - after several phone calls yesterday about the recent spider web phenomena, I did some research on what the spiders might be and what they are doing. As best I can tell (based on conversations with several local folks, including naturalists in Grand Teton NP), these are baby grass spiders “ballooning”. This years’ young are sending out a few silk strands to try to relocate for the winter. Since spiders obviously can’t fly, they use their silk and the wind to blow them around (not very precise, but better than walking I guess·). Grass spiders are NOT poisonous. If bitten, you might get a bump similar to a mosquito bite, but you will not lose a limb. J They are NOT wolf spiders or hobo spiders (which are poisonous). This happens every year, this year all the spiders seemed to get the signal at once. Locally, these spiders have also been called Flat Creek spiders and balloon spiders.
A couple of good websites on grass spiders and ballooning are:
http://www.spiderzrule.com/grass.htm
http://www.the-piedpiper.co.uk/th11f.htm