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SALT LAKE CITY — When leaving an engagement party, there might be a couple things you'd expect to see in the air: A balloon or two; A champagne cork returning to the earth after celebratory drinks. Looking into the sky only to see thousands of spiders dangling from the power lines is not near the top of the list.
That's why Erick Reis, a 20-year-old web designer from Brazil, grabbed his camera and started filming when he left his friend's party and saw exactly that. A veritable cloud of spider and web filled with thousands of very large spiders.
The footage, posted to YouTube, has garnered nearly 2 million views in recent days, and terrified almost as many in the same time. But how did those spiders get there? And why? So far, there has been some disagreement on these points.
According to an arachnologist contacted by the Examiner, the spiders are Anelosimus eximius, a strange spider in the animal kingdom. Rather than living a solitary life, it lives communally in a colony, with thousands of spiders sharing duties, sharing a giant connected web and sharing their kills.
That makes sense, because you can see an awful lot of spiders in one space, sharing what looks like a single web, something you would not normally see on such a massive scale. But according to arachnologists contacted by Wired, there's just no way those spiders are Anelosimus eximius.
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Spiders are ancient creatures, dating back some 380 million years to the early Paleozoic. Scientists have classified more than 40,000 different spiders, and all of them make silk at some point in their lives. Silk is vital to their survival and reproduction."The spiders I saw in the video are not Anelosimus eximius," Deborah Smith, with the University of Kansas, told Wired.
"The spiders in the video are very large and robust," she said. "It might be worth looking at Parawixia bistriata, a large, group-living orb weaver, to see if that one fits the bill."
Anelosimus eximius are very small, roughly the size of a pencil eraser, according to most, though reports of much larger specimens are recorded. But Parawixia bistriata is much larger, as large as those seen in the video.
Parawixia bistriata is relatively social as well, which would explain why so many of them are seen in the same place. They don't share everything the way Anelosimus eximius does, but they make their webs very close together more like a confederation or a colony than a commune. They disperse when they are in a reproductive cycle and come back together when they are ready to build webs and catch food.
Parawixia bistriata isn't really a threat to humans, despite its relatively large size and tendency to build huge networks of webs. Its venom is designed to paralyze insects and does not harm people. In fact, its venom has been studied as a possible neuroprotective, as many of the compounds and proteins found in it are capable of encouraging glutamate uptake.
