A spider web unlike any seen before (2025)

Summary

Even in a pitch-black cave, what appears to be the world’s largest spider web is hard to miss.It stretches for about 1,140 square feet, about the size of a small home, hanging in a low and narrow passage in a cave spanning the border between Albania and Greece.But what scientists recently found in Sulfur Cave, a network of rooms and passages carved from limestone by the Sarantaporos River, surprised them even more than the size of the web.Inside the spider metropolis — population 111,000 — were two species that had not been known to live together harmoniously, mainly because one species tends to eat the other.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.”Dr. Vrenozi is one of the scientists who published their findings on the Sulfur Cave in the peer-reviewed journal Subterranean Biology last month.“I’ve been working for 18 years with spiders, and I’ve never seen such a community,” she said.Dr. Vrenozi said it was “not so easy” to reach the cave, wearing a wet suit and boots and clinging to ropes while wading across the river through chest-high water. But she added that it was “pure adrenaline for biologists.”When she shined a light into the cave, it looked sparkling, she said. The wider web is actually a pastiche of thousands of individual funnel-shaped webs, she said, and these were “really bright with the light because of the dance of the silk on it, so you could see this surface with a lot of dots, like lights in the gigantic web.”The cave itself was hollowed out by sulfuric acid formed from the oxidation of hydrogen sulfide in the gr...