Spiders spin giant web; entomologists stumped

I like spiders. One of the things I like best about them is their generally solitary nature.

But there's this enormous web at a park in Texas right now that entomologists speculate was probably built by a lot of spiders -- likely of more than one species -- working together. Including some spiders who don't normally do that kind of thing.

The structure is the size of two football fields, apparently. And it's made a serious dent in the local mosquito population, which of course is all to the good.

There are some tropical species of social spiders that will build communal nests, and this ginormous mega-web phenomenon has been documented before, most recently I guess in 2002 in Canada, where one of the park rangers observed that "...the web showed great tensile strength – enough to put a handful of coins on it without them falling through."

The BBC article about it has a video.