Four-Acre Indoor Web Was Home To 107 Million Spiders

Where there’s poop, there’s flies. Where there’s flies, there’s spiders.

So what happens when there is a lot of poop and a lot of flies.. ? Maybe like a sewage treatment plant?

Well, then, you could get a whole bunch of spiders like this:

This is a photo of a section of a four-acre web that was found at the Baltimore Wastewater Treatment Plant in Maryland. Apparently, there is an estimated 107 million orb-weaving spiders of different species assembled a “megaweb” inside one of the plant’s main treatment buildings.

If you’re afraid of spiders, then this web makes your worst nightmare a reality. Can you imagine rolling round in a web full of spiders?? However a team of scientists who studied the web found it fascinating and even published a paper about the web:

“We were unprepared for the sheer scale of the spider population and the extraordinary masses of both three dimensional and sheet-like webbing that blanketed much of the facility’s cavernous interior. Far greater in magnitude than any previously recorded aggregation of orb-weavers, the visual impact of the spectacle was nothing less than astonishing.

In places where the plant workers had swept aside the webbing to access equipment, the silk spider web lay piled on the floor in rope-like clumps as thick as a fire hose.”