14 DAY TRIAL // First off, fair warning: this piece of news is not for the faint of heart, and those who find spiders positively terrifying should at least consider skipping it. Unless they are in the mood to tone their muscles running for the hills. Screaming.
Not to beat about the bush, it was just in time for this year's Halloween that the media dug up a story about a ginormous web that was discovered inside the building of a water treatment plant quite a while ago, in 2009.
Photos of the web, estimated to have been the size of three America football fields put together when found and destroyed, have since gone viral. Unless you're planning to stay awake all night, just scroll down and have a look at them.
Possibly the biggest spider web ever discovered
As mentioned, this spider web was found and destroyed years ago, in 2009. It is understood that it was discovered inside a water treatment plant in the city of Baltimore in Maryland, US. Apparently, the web covered about 95% of the building.
Thus, it is estimated that, if stretched out, this palace that spiders in Baltimore took the time to build for themselves would have covered an area of about 16,099 square meters (approximately 173,288 square feet), Huffington Post informs.
As if the sheer size of this web weren't enough to send chills down people's spines, word has it that, at the time the plant workers reported the infestation and asked for help reclaiming the building, the web was crawling with about 107 million spiders.
Of these arachnids, the majority were orb-weaver spiders. Together with thousands other creepy crawlers belonging to other species, these arachnids survived inside the building of the water treatment plant on a diet of small flies known to entomologist as midges.
The web was freakishly heavy as well
Researchers and workers who had the chance to closely examine the web before it was destroyed say that, in the areas where it was piled up on the floor, it was about the size of a fire hose in thickness. Because of its weight, the web even pulled light fixtures out of place.
“Far greater in magnitude than any previously recorded aggregation of orb-weavers, the visual impact of the spectacle was nothing less than astonishing,” reads a description of the web published in the journal the American Entomologist in 2010.
Furthermore, “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.”
One can only hope that it will be a cryogenic day in hell before spiders once again decide to get together and build such a massive web anywhere near us. Should this ever again happen, chances are that we'll all pack our bags and try to book a flight to Mars.
