A web of a hundred thousand spiders was found in a cave in southern Europe

From the cave A strange discovery has been revealed on the border between Greece and Albania, which can be thought of as the nightmare of every arachnid.

The wall of the cave is covered with a hundred square meter multi-layered spider web.

Based on their calculations, the researchers estimate that more than a hundred thousand spiders use the web. More precisely, 64,000 house spiders (Tegenaria domestica), familiar even to Finns, who have woven a web, and 42,000 Prinerigone vagans spiders, which belong to the hanging spiders.

Individuals of both species usually live by themselves. Some other species form communities, but never before has this kind of joint venture between cave spiders been observed, researchers are writing In the journal Subterranean Biology.

Special the environment has favored cooperation. The place of the network is a sulfur cave, whose food chain does not start with plants or other connected organisms.

The sun would be needed to power the connection, but it doesn’t shine in the cave. The air is filled with rotten egg-smelling and toxic hydrogen sulfide. Sulfuric water flows at the bottom of the cave.

Still, the cave teems with life, which also sustains the spiders. It is made possible by the microbiome, which gets its nutrition by oxidizing sulfur.

Microbes produce a biofilm, i.e. a new microbial community, on the moist walls of the cave. The biofilm is eaten, among other things, by small gnats. They fly over the water like buckets in flocks.

Gnats cling in droves to the mega-web that the spiders have woven by the stream. This way the spiders get plenty of food.

Insulation and as a result of the peculiar conditions, the spiders in the cave have developed genetically slightly different from their fellow species living outside, the study revealed.

Centipedes, scorpions, springtails and beetles also live in the cave. The mouth of the cave is in Greece, the deep parts on the Albanian side.