Spin your web

In one of my earlier posts I had talked about man made and natural, and actually I had talked about birds weaving their nests etc. Today I saw one such act of nature live.

There was a spider which had decided to make its home in my garden. So it had begun its construction activities. Spider Webs comes in different types. So this one in my garden, I guess, belongs to Aranaidae family which spins spiral orb webs.

The striking factor of this whole "construction" activity was the speed. This guy was amazingly fast. He/she spun the web which had a diameter of about a foot and a half in just around 10 mins, that too with amazing precision. It is a pity I did not record it on video.

It was too dark at that time, but I managed to get a good picture of the construction. Looks like he did not take a day off on May Day/Labor Day (Read my earlier post) :-P

Blind Spiders !!

What do you think a spider can do that too a blind one? It has actually stopped the progress of setting up a mine worth $10 Billion. This is in Western Australia where a new iron ore mine was being setup. As part of the excavations they found few species of this spider and they were deemed as endangered species. Hence the mining has been put on hold. So what is so special about this spider?

These species of spider are a form of animals called troglobites. These animals apparently live only in pitch darkness, i.e. total darkness. They live underground in caves mainly. These animals cannot survive the normal sunlight even for minutes as they are affected by the ultra violet rays. They have adapted themselves so much to this kind of environment, that many of such troglobites do not have functioning eyes anymore. Many of them also seem to have lost pigmentation, i.e they do not have colors and are translucent. These animals feed upon few organic material found in the crevices and cracks in the rocks and also from left overs of food of other animals which frequent the caves. So these animals seem to be very much dependent on their local ecosystem that any kind of tampering with it could cause them to be killed.

This fragile ecosystem of these creatures has led to the holding of mining as it would destroy their ecosystem and hence the species itself.

What I find very interesting in this itself, is the nature of these creatures. They seem to thrive only in darkness. These guys have developed other senses like strong sense of smell, vibration sensors etc. which are needed in the dark environs over their eyes. Nature has so many different types of creations.