Monday,
October 8, 2007
Monarchs
are not the only ones that travel with the wind. Baby spiders don't
have wings, but they can fly as high as the highest-flying insects
and birds. Monarchs and spiders were flying in the wind on Monday
as these people witnessed in Oklahoma:
"From about 6:00 p.m. to 7:15 p.m. yesterday evening (10/8/07)
we observed at least 200 to 300 hundred Monarchs flying into our
yard and roosting in our trees. Some were trailing strands of
what looked like spiderweb."
"From
mid day until about 4:30 pm the sky was filled with many hundreds
(or even thousands) of spider webs and strands (some attached
to Monarchs). Almost everything was very high in the sky,"
reported Mike in Pauls Valley, to Oklahoma's bird hotline.
Evidently
this was spider silk that was trailing behind the monarchs. The
silk was from tiny, young spiders that were dispersing by "ballooning."
Like the young spiders in Charlotte's Web, they were carried away
on silk threads.
"The spider's offspring come out of the egg sack, go to the
highest point and raise their abdomen up in the air and release
a thread of silk," spider expert David Moellendorf told Austin's
KXAN News radio. As the silk gets longer, the wind currents pick
up the spiders and carry them away. In this way they disperse
to new habitat, just as seeds blow in the wind to a new place
to grow. The spiders were probably "Golden Orb Weavers"
a species that disperses in the fall.
Charlotte's
Web & Ballooning Spiders
The all-time favorite CHARLOTTE'S WEB
ends in the springtime, as tiny spiderlings emerge from Charlotte's
egg case. Read more...
|
Who
would guess?
Spider silk is one of the dangers monarchs can face during
migration.
(This
monarch was caught in a spider web but was saved right after this
picture was taken.) |
