Silky skies

  

Silk!  After hearing about Eric's dragonfly and butterfly observations last night, I was scanning the San Francisco Chronicle headlines and noticed an unusual one -- something like "Baby spiders are falling from the sky..."  

Young spiders drift on silk threads to disperse to new areas, and there were reports from the Bay Area of clumps of silk both in the sky and on the ground.   I wondered if they were in Sonoma County, too, so while eating lunch today we kept an eye out and sure enough, we saw several clumps of silk crossing our view.

Then I went out to try to photograph a few for the record and these are the results.  Often there was a larger, denser clump of silk at the end of a very narrow thread-like strand:

 

 

I was photographing these bundles of silk almost directly overhead and they were fairly high up, so I couldn't always see the entire streamer at the time.  I was impressed to see how long some of them were when I started to review the photos.  Look carefully to see how far the slender threads extend from the clump:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many of the concentrated clumps of silk were about half the size of my palm.  And I estimate the lengths of the strands in these photos range from ~2 feet (0.5 meter) to ~5 feet (1.5 meters) long.  

 

I wondered if you could find a spider in the silk, so I walked briefly to check for silk on nearby vegetation.  I found several, but I didn't have any luck finding a spider.

I'm curious about why these silk balloons are so prominent this year.  Is it a certain species of spider?  Or are spiders producing more silk this year for some reason?  Or are there just more of them this year so they are more noticeable?  Or was it something about the weather that caused larger clumps of silk to form?  Hmmphhh!