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A Texas park is engulfed in a mega web. 400-ft long wall of web. You can't escape. How terrifying. What kind of prey are they trying to catch? Could a deer get stuck in that? Could a person? Locals fear an eight-legged invader has developed a taste for human flesh. My biggest fear was being eaten alive by spiders. Lake Tawakoni State Park, Texas. A quiet rural retreat just 50 miles west of Dallas. Park Ranger Freddy Gowen is checking a trail when he stumbles on a vision from a nightmare.
I came around this one corner. I saw the strangest thing I've ever seen in my life. A gigantic spider web spread right across the trail. I thought I'd got caught up in a sci-fi movie or something. The sinister web towers over 40 ft high and spreads sticky threads hundreds of feet across. It was terrifying. It would scare you to death. What scared me was it could take over and totally destroy the park. The first thing I wondered when I saw all the spider web was, is it from one giant spider?
Zoologist Roland Kays fears the world's biggest spider has made itself at home in Texas. The largest spider in the world is called the giant huntsman, and it's so big that if you stretch its legs out, it can be up to a foot long. The giant huntsman is just one of a large group of carnivorous huntsman spiders. They use their venom to feed on cockroaches, and in this footage, a mouse. But some spiders also attack humans, their bite causing necrosis, death of human cells. Send help. One aggressive huntsman spider even traps this Australian woman in her home. Those are very dangerous spiders.
You don't wish to have one of those end up in your sleeping bag. But spider expert Kevin Caskey finds a flaw in Kay's huntsman hunch. The huntsman isn't a web slinger. They don't create a web because they are what we call active hunters. They run after their prey. Caskey suspects that the culprit might be a spider that kills not with venom, but with the stunning, strangulating strength of its web. Darwin's bark spider makes the biggest web. Measured at 25 m or about 82 ft. Darwin's bark spider web is the strongest biological material ever studied.
10 times tougher than Kevlar, one of its 30-sq-ft webs could support a 2-ton family car or easily trap a human victim. I don't think I'd want to come across one of those in a dark passage cuz I don't think I'd get out of their web. But biologist Kelly Price spots a clue in the footage that suggests the web can't be the work of the Darwin bark spider. Webs are usually built solitarily and to a very organized pattern. But here we see a mishmash of a whole bunch of different webs and no organized pattern whatsoever.
This leads experts to an alarming discovery. The monstrous tangle of spider silk hasn't been spun by a single giant specimen. This park has become the domain of an army of thousands of web-spinning arachnids. We didn't know what kind of spider it was. That's the scariest part. What they fear most is a pack of the Lone Star State's deadliest native spider, the black widow. One bite can kill a human. Black widow spiders kill seven people in the US each year. So to see this many spiders all working together is kind of terrifying.
Black widow venom is 15 times stronger than a rattlesnake. Although solitary, they do socialize in mating season, and this is black widow mating season. Female black widows kill males after mating. Could these homicidal females be turning their violent dating methods towards bigger prey? When you see spider web this big, you wonder what kind of prey are they trying to catch? How big of a prey could a deer get stuck in that? Could a person? Spider expert Mike Quinn steps up to the challenge. But when he examines the massive web, he spots something incredible.
There are at least 16 species of spiders living in the web. Species of spider that would normally fight to the death are working together. Most spiders are territorial, so uh having all these different spiders all together was really unusual. Spiders are not normally social insects. The only time that they enjoy other spiders' company is when it's time for dinner, and usually meaning that they've invited them over to be the dinner.
Scientists estimate the global spider population eats up to 800 million tons of prey each year. These eight-legged predators could eat every human on Earth and still have room for dessert. I just thought they're going to attack all at one time. They will eat me alive. I know they will. A monster web in a Texas park is packed with a skin-crawling assortment of spiders. It's not normal behavior to have spiders on top of spiders. With an armored exoskeleton, toxic venom, and eight-eyed spidey senses, the only thing stopping spiders from world domination is that most of them operate as lone wolves until now.
This raises the question why are these spiders congregating all together, and why did they build one massive web? Zoologist Roland Kays reexamines the footage and discovers a clue to the spider behavior. Vast numbers of small flies called midges have been caught in the web. If there's lots to eat, their populations can grow really quickly, and that seems to be what happened in case. It's kind of a spider feeding frenzy with all these midges in the air. All the spiders have come into this one area to catch them all while they can.
The worry for local Texans is what will happen when the spiders run out of midges.
