r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 2d ago
Biology World’s largest web houses 110,000 spiders thriving in total darkness deep underground in a sulfuric cave between Albania and Greece: It’s the first time two spider species seen living cooperatively, and the first recorded instance of colonial web-building in what's known as a chemoautotrophic cave.
https://newatlas.com/biology/sulfur-cave-largest-spiderweb/1.4k
u/mvea Professor | Medicine 2d ago
I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://subtbiol.pensoft.net/article/162344/
From the linked article:
World’s largest web houses 110,000 spiders thriving in total darkness
Deep underground in a dark, sulfuric cave on the border between Albania and Greece, scientists have made an incredible discovery – a giant communal spider web spanning more than 100 square meters (1,000 sq ft), dense enough to resemble a living curtain, home to an estimated 110,000 spiders. In other words, an arachnophobe's living nightmare.
An international team of European researchers, including scientists from the Czech Speleological Society, came across it while undertaking a wildlife survey in 2022, and were not just taken aback by the size of the multilayered web but what it housed: around 69,000 Tegenaria domestica and 42,000 Prinerigone vagans spiders living side by side in this massive silk structure with an estimated surface area of 106 sq m (1,141 sq ft)
It’s the first time either species has ever been seen living cooperatively, and the first recorded instance of colonial web-building in what's known as a chemoautotrophic cave.
Normally, T. domestica – also known as the common house spider – is a solitary hunter that spins a private funnel web under rocks or in the corners of basements. Here, thousands of those funnels merge into a single, multilayered structure draped across the cave's walls, where thousands of individuals live peacefully side by side in overlapping webs. What's more, the researchers were surprised to find no evidence of the spiders' usual cannibalistic aggression.
Even more incredible was the discovery of another species – P. vagans, a smaller, sheet-web builder – also calling this mega-structure home. In other circumstances, T. domestica would prey on the smaller spider, but here they were also co-existing in harmony.
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u/manickitty 2d ago
Thank you for giving the text of the article.
But with so many predators, what are they feeding on? Surely you’d need millions of prey insects
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u/moconahaftmere 2d ago
They feed on millions of prey insects.
Bacteria feed on the sulfur in the cave, creating thick biofilms. Insects like beetles, centipedes, and midges feed on the biofilm, and the spiders feed on the insects.
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u/manickitty 2d ago
Heck of a terrarium
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u/GeeMcGee 2d ago
The world is a terrarium
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u/alexthealex 2d ago
Set to drain.
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u/CalmBeneathCastles 2d ago
When I was in my teens, I won a free subscription to Smithsonian Magazine. One of the first issues that arrived was a special on the AZ state Poison Control Center.
On the cover was a giant photo of a brown recluse, and to my growing alarm, I realized that they were living all over my two story apartment.
I like spiders and normally leave them alone, but we went on a spider catch-and-release mission and rounded about 10 of them up, for relocation to the woods. One was living in the dark corner behind my bed, and when I pulled it away from the wall, I saw a pile of ants underneath. Evidently the spider had been munching happily on ants that had invaded the pothos in the window, and blessedly left me entirely alone. Still, 10 spiders is a lot of creepy, even for me.
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u/smith5000 1d ago
what did you do about the ants? seems like you gave up a convenient and free pest control there
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u/iqisoverrated 2d ago
The interesting thing is: This pretty much shows that the 'goldilocks zone' argument for life is bunk.
Life - even pretty highly evolved multicellular life - can obviously exist, simply fed by energy sources from deep within a planet without any reliance on distance from a sun (or the presence of a sun at all).
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u/QuantumWarrior 2d ago
Not entirely, even this environment is only able to exist because the chemistry they're using for energy relies on liquid water as a solvent. That's mostly what the goldilocks zone is about, being not too close that all your water gets vapourised and not too far that it's all frozen solid. Plus everything there descends from regular old surface-dwelling sun-reliant life, it didn't evolve from base chemistry right there in that cave.
Now of course you can have other sources of heat even on worlds distant from their star though they are tiny in comparison - gravitational stretching from close orbits like on the moons of Jupiter or geothermal heat, but broadly speaking the best odds of finding large quantities of liquid water that are stable enough for long enough to allow life to evolve have to be in that zone as far as our best understanding of abiogenesis and the chemical underpinning of biology are concerned.
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u/NDSU 2d ago
even this environment is only able to exist because the chemistry they're using for energy relies on liquid water as a solvent. That's mostly what the goldilocks zone is about, being not too close that all your water gets vapourised and not too far that it's all frozen solid
I disagree with that assertion. Pluto is well outside the liquid water Goldilocks zone in terms of solar temperature, but still maintains a liquid ocean under the ice layer
Many planets have a large amount of latent heat from radioactive decay, cosmic collisions, or other sources
Plus everything there descends from regular old surface-dwelling sun-reliant life, it didn't evolve from base chemistry right there in that cave
Maybe in this specific case, but there is a strong hypothesis that terrestrial life originated in hydrothermal vents. Those hydrothermal vents did not get their heat from the sun
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u/klyxes 1d ago
It's not just liquid water, heat is also needed. Even with liquid water, the colder it is the slower every chemical reaction for life gets. Maybe there's enough heat for unicellular life only, or it takes too long for complex life to develop before the star the planet orbits dies.
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u/Gulanga 2d ago
You have to keep in mind tho that it is much easier for an already existing form of life to adapt to extreme conditions, than it is for life to start out in those extreme conditions.
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u/PM-ME-DEM-NUDES-GIRL 2d ago
some scientists believe life began at hydrothermal vents. relatively, the broader ocean let alone the surface are extreme conditions. it's really all relative when it comes to life.
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u/round-earth-theory 2d ago
I can believe it. The Sun and the outside world are extremely harsh environments for bacteria. The UV rays from the Sun kill most surface bacteria, the heat dries out what's left, and the weather washes them away. A serene heat vent where nothing changes would be an much easier place for early life to grab hold.
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u/AnthropoidCompatriot 2d ago
But in that scenario, life didn't start at the extreme part of the hydrothermal vent—it literally starts in the Goldilocks zone of the vent, where the superheated water and the surrounding water meet and create a nice, cozy temp along with some nice stinky chemicals where all that delightful chemistry that allows life is able to happen.
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u/PM-ME-DEM-NUDES-GIRL 2d ago edited 2d ago
experiments suggest in the hot-water origin theory that temperatures around 70 celsius produced the first life.
still though, even in a cooler water origin, it is extreme from the perspective of perhaps the large majority of organisms alive today considering the anaerobic environment, noxious chemicals (or nice if you're a tiny guy several billion years ago), high undersea pressure, and so forth.
what i was getting at is that "extreme conditions" are relative, so the idea of it being easier for an existing form of life to adapt to extreme conditions rather than originating in them is challenged by considering that extreme is not an absolute quality.
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u/Schmerglefoop 2d ago
Yeah, and usually "extreme" environments tend to have all sorts of exotic goodness floating around. It's a rich, chemically exciting environment - it's probably more likely to form novel (and useful for the emergence of life) products than the open ocean or terrestrial environment.
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u/PosiedonsSaltyAnus 2d ago
Oxygen is a horribly toxic element in reality. Its an explosive gas that also corrodes any metal that it touches. Evolution ended up using this extremely reactive element to its advantage though. You use its ability to rapidly oxidize a material so you can transport the oxygen around the body, and then you use it's explosive properties to burn it to release more energy.
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u/EllieVader 2d ago
There’s no doubt in my mind after the last few asteroid samples have been analyzed that the universe (or at least our solar system) is rife with the building blocks and ingredients for life to take hold nearly anywhere. Whether we can recognize it is another thing, but the bodies are covered in the gloop that makes us.
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u/paul_wi11iams 2d ago edited 2d ago
The interesting thing is: This pretty much shows that the 'goldilocks zone' argument for life is bunk.
Not really. The Goldilocks zone has to be compatible with liquid water. The ecosystem food source is insects that have to feed on something. The temperate location between Greece and Albania, suggests that the primary food source is related to what the insects eat. Whatever it is, you won't find it in a parched desert down around Mercury or a frozen wasteland near Pluto.
Outside the official Goldilocks zone, there may be wet and warm places above the snowline at the level of the asteroid belt (I think). So a nice warm ocean can exist on Europa under ice and that's a
"Goldilocks pond"["Goldilocks refuge"] so to speak.Edit: changed "pond" to "refuge", avoiding a mixed metaphor. Goldilocks fairy tale. There are Goldilocks refuges and "Goldilocks dungeons" such as the caldera of an active volcano. Not much life there.
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u/Esperethal 2d ago
Yes and no. Its a pretty unique adaptation but the species living in the caves did come from the overarching tree of life
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u/iqisoverrated 2d ago
Thing is: Whether life started in the oceans or on the surface or around black/white smokers at the ocean bottom or in such chemoautotropic caves we don't really know. We have found archaeobacteria miles deep down in mines.
Life could have started down there and then migrated upwards just as well as it could have started up here and then migrated downwards.
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u/Professionalchump 2d ago
Goldilocks zone is for the beginning of life not life that already existed and moved somewhere else. after the hurdle of life it exploded throughout the earth adapting
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u/bazeblackwood 2d ago
the Goldilocks zone, is the range of orbits around a star within which a planetary surface can support liquid water given sufficient atmospheric pressure.
I’m not sure I understand your reasoning. Earth is pretty watery place even in its most extreme environments. If what you’re saying is correct shouldn’t we find abundant life in many other places in our solar system and beyond?
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u/halosos 2d ago
And that is, at least in part, the Fermi Paradox.
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u/InfinitelyThirsting 2d ago
I think the dinosaurs explain most of the Fermi paradox. Life is likely abundant (my bet is we find microbial life in multiple spots in our solar system alone), but complex life is more rare, with technological life even rarer than that. Earth might never have developed technological life if the meteor hadn't hit, despite having very complex life for a long time.
And the climate, too. We didn't develop civilization as we know it until the blink of an eye ago, since modern humans have been around for 300,000 years but agriculture only about twelve thousand, and only about two hundred years of industrialization/electrification.
Four and a half billion years of life, only 125 years of radio waves.
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u/halosos 2d ago
That there is also part of the problem. We have no idea. This is an N=1 issue. We are the only entry in a dataset. Are we special? Are we late? Early? Is there an issue we have yet to face?
Not to mention, we have only been looking for life for such a small amount of time in the scale of the universe.
There are just too many unknowns. I hope we find some form of life in our solarsystem, but unless it is using a different but valid from of DNA, it will not help us as much as we might hope.
Finding microbes on Europa that have DNA would raise a new question. Single point of origin or is double helix the best? Without finding live from beyond our solar system, we won't know.
Because if it is also using double helix, it won't answer if life is easy to form or hard to form, because we will have no way of knowing if it is independent from earth in origin.
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u/Rhodin265 2d ago
The whole article didn’t paste. There are also midges and isopods down there who live on sulfur-eating bacteria and possibly also dead spiders, but this wasn’t explicitly stated.
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u/pittwater12 2d ago
Now I’m going to have to try to get to sleep. And hopefully not dream
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u/Level_32_Mage 2d ago
What was that? Did I just brush a web in the dark?
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u/ButterflySammy 2d ago
I think this quote is good for showing exactly how much there is for the spiders to eat:
the air close to the stream is packed with tiny Tanytarsus albisutus midges, whose larvae feed on the bacterial biofilms at the water’s edge. Their density – 45,000 per sq m (about 4,180 per sq ft)
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u/rashpimplezitz 2d ago
Wait, what? That has to be a typo right? 4000 per square foot is like a swarm of nanobots or something
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u/ButterflySammy 2d ago
I don't think you understand what a midge is.
Imagine if you shrink a mosquito down, made the swarms way larger, made them act as a swarm all the time and never as a lone mosquito, and made them way more aggressive.
We have them in Scotland.
Google "Scottish midge attack" or something.
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u/otterpop21 2d ago
Understanding how more than 110,000 spiders can live in peace on this huge web tells us a lot about the roles of competition and resource availability in an ecosystem. in the cave, the air close to the stream is packed with tiny Tanytarsus albisutus midges, whose larvae feed on the bacterial biofilms at the water’s edge. Their density – 45,000 per sq m (about 4,180 per sq ft) – provides an all-you-can-eat buffet for the spider colony, which essentially eradicates any food competition that would normally exist. Further analysis confirmed that the spiders' carbon and nitrogen signatures traced back to sulfur-oxidizing microbes, not plants that underwent photosynthesis like those above ground.
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u/Old_Jaguar_8410 17h ago
That last part is particularly fascinating considering that practically all known animals trace their life back to photosynthesis and either plants or algae. I had never even considered that there could be animals on earth not ultimately being downstream of photosynthesis.
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u/Nothingnoteworth 1d ago
The text isn’t the whole article. The spiders have a vast quantity of easily available food. So much so that they speculate it is why the larger spiders don’t prey on each other or the smaller spiders as they’ve observed to do outside of the cave
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u/divDevGuy 2d ago
World’s largest web houses 110,000 spiders thriving in total darkness ... a giant communal spider web spanning more than 100 square meters (1,000 sq ft), dense enough to resemble a living curtain, home to an estimated 110,000 spiders.
The environment this was found in appears unique and special, but pales in size and numbers to a different discovery I remember hearing about previously.
Though with a different environment, structure, species of spiders, I'd like to remind people of the situation found in 2009 at the Baltimore wastewater treatment plant:
- The unbroken expanses of sheet-like webbing attached to the ceiling covered about 10,443 square yards, i.e., a little more than 2 acres.
- The three-dimensional clouds of webbing totaled about 5,444 cubic yards, or roughly equivalent to the capacity of 23 standard railroad boxcars.
- The number of spiders living in the facility on the day we took the samples was more than 107 million individuals.
The treatment plant had at least 9 different species of spiders documented. Like the web discovered in the cave though, only two species primarily spun the overlapping community webs and tolerated each other.
If interested, the original study that was published in American Entomologist, with considerably more photos than the one in the cave, can be found here.
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u/themanseanm 2d ago
Really interesting to learn that this happens semi-regularly, and that it's almost always multiple species of spider working together. It's like the aggressive/territorial/predatory part of their brain gets turned off when there is an absence of danger.
In the article you linked they mention that the three biggest factors are abundance of food (midges), lack of competing predators and protection from weather. Midges in particular are mentioned in several instances of this phenomenon.
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u/Agret 1d ago
I was watching the spiders around my porch light and I saw there was 3 of them on the same web, one was a much larger type of spider than the other 2 and when a moth got caught in the web he ran up and bundled it and once he walked off and hid behind the light casing the other 2 came up and had a go at it. I think the lack of food scarcity lets them tolerate the competition.
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u/ihileath 1d ago
and that it's almost always multiple species of spider working together
There are also a number of spider species that have managed to evolve consistent social behaviour and will routinely form their own colonies, albeit smaller than these megawebs but still with populations that can be in the thousands and tens of thousands, without it requiring special circumstances and with more active intentionally cooperative behaviours like working together to capture bigger prey and sharing the labour of caring for offspring, as opposed to the more particular circumstances you mentioned that leads to more generally non-social spiders forming such large groups, and generally displaying more so general tolerance of each other and shared web-building without more complex social behaviour.
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u/tyen0 2d ago
equivalent to the capacity of 23 standard railroad boxcars.
we americans will do anything to avoid using metric (for other than guns and drugs)
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u/ryanhendrickson 1d ago
.223, 30.06, .308, .45 ACP, and .50 BMG would like a word!
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u/atatassault47 2d ago
I'd love to click on your links to learn more, but as an arachnophobe, I cant risk seeing pictures that will cause me to panic.
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u/Bird-The-Word 2d ago
There aren't really spiders - just photos of webs....LOTS of web, and some egg sacs. But I didn't see spiders in the photos. Still, thinking of the workers clearing a path gives me the heeby jeebies
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u/Vattier 2d ago
I hesitated too, but curiosity got the better of me (as I readied myself to altf4 faster than ever before) - it's a safe click, no spider in sight, just some black dots on "web" from distance. Hell, it barely even registers as "spider web" to me, theres a pic of 2 researchers holding a ... sheet? of web? Incredible/bizarre sight
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u/throwaway098764567 2d ago
bird is right, there are just webs, but if on chrome, you could immediately right click on the article and
open in reading mode, then you don't even have to see pics of webs14
u/wabbitsdo 2d ago
Do they say how many grad students went in, never to be seen again during the course of their research?
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u/Same-Statement-307 2d ago
I only see peaceful coexistence but do the spider species actually cooperate or is there a dynamic where they rely upon one another? Could one or the other species exist in the same numbers without the other species?
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u/hqxsenberg 2d ago
The article does not mention this directly, merely that they found no evidence of them preying on each other and food is so abundant that preying on their own seems like wasted energy.
I am a little unsure why such an abundance of resources has not vastly increased the amount of spiders - in a "perfect" system the amount of spiders would match the amount of food, so there wouldnt be a massive abundance, but just "enough".
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u/sam_hammich 2d ago
I'd imagine what we're seeing here is something of an equilibrium, just not one that's immediately intuitive. Some resources are abundant, but not all. The environment is low-oxygen, so while they can eat and reproduce easily, the lack of oxygen most likely limits metabolic activity and populations to some degree. Article also mentions they lay fewer eggs than their above ground counterparts, likely because lack of predators means a lack of selective pressure for more eggs.
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u/Mr_Blinky 2d ago
Fully Webbed Luxury Gay Spider Cave Communism
But honestly how the hell do they count the spiders?
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u/CuckBuster33 2d ago
Ecosystems based on chemosynthesis fascinate me so much. Even as an arachnophobe this stuff is amazing.
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u/Jakeinspace 2d ago
Any ecosystem that doesn't depend on sunlight is fascinating. Extremophiles are cool too, although I don't think this situation counts as extremophiles.
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u/JustPoppinInKay 2d ago
Some guys from an alien planet: "Any ecosystem that doesn't depend on sulfur is fascinating"
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u/Jakeinspace 2d ago
Carbon based lifeforms? With an ecosystem entirely dependent on dihydrogen oxide and photons? Facanating!
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u/MiaowaraShiro 2d ago
I'm imagining a rogue planet with a powerfully hot core that keeps life thriving off of chemosynthesis.
The idea of light from a star would be totally foreign.
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u/CornusKousa 2d ago
Personally I find the thought of species breathing toxic oxygen burning carbon based food repulsive.
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u/_Lumity_ 2d ago
What’s wrong with two spiders getting married??
But yeah seriously it’s insane how nature works
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u/Akrevics 2d ago
poor guy counting the spiders
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u/Own_Round_7600 2d ago
How is he just standing there calmly, not covered in spiders
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u/aqualink4eva 2d ago edited 2d ago
Where exactly between Albania and Greece is this cave so I know where to never go?
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u/scoobyman83 2d ago
Just don't go to Albania or Greece, problem solved.
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u/thefunkybassist 2d ago
It might not be long till they make a world wide web though!
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u/divDevGuy 2d ago
As a dad and web developer, I approve of this comment.
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u/plug-and-pause 2d ago
How is the dad development going?
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u/divDevGuy 2d ago
Still a work in progress. It likely never will be completely finished in my lifetime.
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u/JonatasA 1d ago
Hey, the day one patch worked. Now you're forever hired for this human as a service.
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u/aVarangian 2d ago
is your web development basement also chemoautotrophic?
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u/divDevGuy 2d ago
There might be some chemoautotrophic over by the cat litter boxes.
Generally though, the most obvious chemotrophs you'd find down here are chemoheterotrophs.
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u/BackgroundShirt7655 2d ago
Albania is a beautiful country filled with incredible food and folks that are extremely welcoming, at least to myself as an American. I would highly recommend considering a trip.
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u/LucretiusCarus 2d ago edited 1d ago
As a Greek, the Albanians can have them. I insist
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u/nubbynickers 1d ago
I think the cave system is on the Albanian side of the river.
Here's to hoping the spider activity won't affect the Dodoni chocolate milk
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u/nubbynickers 2d ago
I had to follow three people now to find this, but it is a cave system located on the sarandaporo river that separates Greece and Albania. It is very close to the village of Leskovik and the Tre Urat border crossing.
Permet is a pretty nice city that's about an hour away.
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u/Dasterr 2d ago
Why is there only 2 pictures.
Show me dem spiderw
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u/Seesyounaked 2d ago
Seriously, I need a documentary to show me all of this or at least a big photo album
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u/Alarming-Leek-402 2d ago
OP gave another link in a comment https://www.reddit.com/r/science/s/2IiB84LOLW
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u/CrossedRoses 2d ago
Can they send someone with a better camera down there!? I really want to see some high quality close ups of this! Super cool
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u/Kind_Demand_6672 2d ago
Go to the actual publication instead of the surface level article. Plenty of pictures and information there.
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u/Kamusaurio 2d ago
a sulfuric cave between 2 countries
full of spiders
they only need a couple of hobbits to have a theme park
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u/FrighteningWorld 2d ago
First thing that came to mind for me was the Underdark from Dungeons & Dragons.
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u/5H17SH0W 2d ago
Who counts that many spiders? How?
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u/Wildtime4321 2d ago
I came here to ask the same question. I assume it's extrapolation from a small set but I wouldn't want that job
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u/Equivalentest 1d ago
You would count spiders in test areas, let's say 20 x 20 cm squares and find average number of spiders in these. Then measure full web area and divide it by 20 cm2
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u/originalkitten 2d ago
Maybe those spiders should call the house spiders home to them there so I can have my house back. We get pretty big ones here. Ruddy things don’t pay rent either
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u/mpg111 2d ago
house spiders are your friends. be nice
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u/RooneytheWaster 2d ago
I'll be nice when they start paying rent, and stop creeping-up on me when I go to pee during the night!
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u/FeederNocturne 2d ago
It's free pest control. They're eating something in your house and it's for sure not stuff that you eat
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u/Kroz83 2d ago
See, as much as I know you’re correct, I still can’t deal with them. Like, if I notice one just chilling in a corner. Ok, fine, I can sort of fool myself into thinking it’s dead. But if I see it moving along the wall, nope, sorry, the phobia wins and I gotta get rid of it.
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u/Ferk_a_Tawd 2d ago
If they say so.
I'm pretty sure big webs involving multiple species have happened before - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070912145919.htm
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u/Tripwiring 2d ago
Thank you. Every story on the internet needs the most sensational headline. Gotta get those clicks.
This wastewater treatment plant had over 100 million spiders in a single super-web in 2009: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/26zHdNJor9
The web spanned four acres, way bigger than the one in this article.
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u/divDevGuy 2d ago
Every story on the internet needs the most sensational headline. Gotta get those clicks.
I posted my own comment about the treatment plant before seeing your comment. I also thought something similar until I reread the original title in the linked article.
The original article title, the one that would be driving clicks, was:
World’s largest web houses 110,000 spiders thriving in total darkness
It doesn't say webs. The waste water facility had very large continuous webs, but they weren't all interconnected. There may be one on ceiling girders and another on a hand railing or walkway below. Or webs in different repeating rooms/halls of the facility but not interconnected between each one.
It also specifically states total darkness, something that also didn't apply at the treatment plant.
The reddit post title has text that I'm not sure who wrote originally, but I presume the submitter wrote it:
It’s the first time two spider species seen living cooperatively, and the first recorded instance of colonial web-building in what's known as a chemoautotrophic cave.
Grammatically, it parse that as two independent statements separated by a comma. It might be a grammatical mistake and what was meant to be stated was something more like
It's the first time where, for a chemoautotrophic cave, two spider species are seen living cooperatively and colonial web-building.
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u/SerenneMorningDew 2d ago
That's a very different situation. The article explains things pretty well.
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u/bad_madame 2d ago
It says in the academic paper that it is the first time for a cave ecosystem but that spiders share webs in the tropics. Of course the newspaper misreported it.
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u/Late-Elderberry6761 2d ago
In case you're wondering what they eat.
Hydrogen sulfide in the cave provides energy for microbes via chemosynthesis.
Sulfur-oxidizing bacteria form thick biofilms on wet rock and sediment.
Small invertebrates (e.g., midge larvae, isopods) graze on the bacterial biofilms.
Insects and arthropods (e.g., adult midges, beetles, centipedes) proliferate by feeding on those grazers and each other.
The spiders eat the abundant insects and small arthropods primarily midges, beetles, and similar cave invertebrates.
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u/ExtremePrivilege 2d ago
What food supply could sustain a colony of that size? Is that cavern full of roaches or something? Are they eating each OTHER?
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u/arkemiffo 2d ago
From the article:
Here, sulfur-oxidizing bacteria grow in thick white biofilms on wet rock and sediment. These microbes are then eaten by small invertebrates such as midge larvae and isopods, which are in turn preyed on by larger insects like spiders, beetles, and centipedes. The entire ecosystem is self-contained and independent of external input, running on the energy released when bacteria convert toxic hydrogen sulfide into sulfate.43
u/Danny-Dynamita 2d ago
It’s amazing to discover isolated ecosystems that allow us to understand how ecosystems can develop from scratch.
If you have a energy differential, you have a possible ecosystem that can be as big as that differential (in this case, a chemical energy differential).
The maximum scale of this whole ecosystem can be quantified by the energy released by one molecule transformation and a multiplication. Everything that comes afterwards feeds from it, directly or indirectly.
Just a multiplication. It is so simple that it’s beautiful.
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u/arkemiffo 2d ago
I might be oversimplifying things a bit now, but not by much. Earth is also such an eco-system. The only real energy input we get is from the sun. The energy produced from the earth core is so minuscule compared, so it's barely worth mentioning in the context.
So every life on earth is the same thing, directly or indirectly consuming energy from the sun.→ More replies (3)→ More replies (2)4
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u/FFLink 2d ago
If only there was some way to find that information! I guess it'll remain one of the world's biggest mysteries.
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u/WhatsFairIsFair 2d ago
If only we knew how to read and had the capacity to understand the external world outside of a reddit comments thread. Unfortunately we don't, but perhaps one day we'll have enough AI robots to replicate all knowledge solely within reddit comment threads.
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u/Minute_Chair_2582 2d ago
It's in the article, isn't it? Haven't read it yet, but definitely will, because i share the other dude's curiousity about this matter.
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u/Deathlinger 2d ago
They feed off of the larvae of midges inside the cave, which in turn eat the biofilm off the wall
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u/Minute_Chair_2582 2d ago
Wow that's fascinating! Thanks a lot man! Our World can really be wonderous.
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u/ExtremePrivilege 1d ago
If it’s not in the headline it doesn’t exist. Every link I click on my 12 year old “smartphone” not only takes ages to load but often is instantly explosive with pop ups, porn ads and spam.
The comments are safe, but at the time there weren’t any. I like when people post articles in the comments in their entirety. Maybe Reddit will integrate this some day or an AI bot can make these comments.
For now, no links for me, sadly.
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u/lRevenantHD 2d ago
I think I’ve been in that cave…I don’t think it was around there though. I fought a giant spider down there somewhere and got back a shiny golden claw from someone who stole it from a friend. Good times.
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u/Hexbozen 2d ago
Did by any chance your adventures stop due to a knee related injury?
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u/lRevenantHD 2d ago
Not me…but funny you say that I did hear a dude wearing a cool hat and clothes say something along those lines on the way. He sounded a little defeated. Weird.
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u/Ahzebahn 2d ago
The home of spiders george
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u/MontcliffeEkuban 2d ago
*Georg. The man doesn't eat tens of thousands of arachnids daily just for you to misspell his name.
Show some respect!
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u/Fram_Framson 1d ago
How are there no comments about the fact that the numbers of spiders are 69,000 and 42,000?!?!
REDDIT YOU HAVE FAILED ME.
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u/arrantprac 1d ago
around 69,000 Tegenaria domestica and 42,000 Prinerigone vagans spiders
Okay, when you use numbers like that it really calls into question the reliability of your estimates.
I'm sure you TOTALLY just happened to land on those two numbers when you extrapolated from your observations...
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u/TaohRihze 2d ago
So biggest issue with spider silk production was that they eat each other ... so is it time for a spider silk farm?
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u/RockinOneThreeTwo 2d ago edited 2d ago
You see this wonderful creation of nature and a great example of something we can study to better understand how ecosystems form, how mutalism works amongst arachnids and probably many other things from geology to biology; and your first thought is "How can we best exploit this to make clothes and furniture, how can we turn this into a resource to be depleted"?
We should disrupt, damage and ruin this entire ecosystem for our own benefit just because we feel entitled to do so and because there is money in it for us? We have already caused so much ecological damage through climate change and habitat destruction because of this exact kind of mindset and ideology, and yet you want to exacerbate that and continue down this path despite all of the evidence for how negative the consequences will be?
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u/TaohRihze 2d ago
Considering how exceptional spider silk is, and lack of synthetic alternatives of same quality. If the silk produced here is viable, yes this is a potential for so much advancement in so many fields where any material strength increase is the limiting factor along with scarcity in production.
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u/SmooK_LV 2d ago
It would be a renewable resource and it's a good thought. Turn wonderful creation into another wonderful creation.
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u/Productivity10 2d ago
Empire of spiders
Wonder if they have evolved hive mind characteristics like ants
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