NYT: Got Arachnophobia? Here’s Your Worst Nightmare

[Snazzy]

Got Arachnophobia? Here’s Your Worst Nightmare



WILLS POINT, Tex., Aug. 29 — Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors.

Sheets of web have encased several mature oak trees and are thick enough in places to block out the sun along a nature trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near this town about 50 miles east of Dallas.

The gossamer strands, slowly overtaking a lakefront peninsula, emit a fetid odor, perhaps from the dead insects entwined in the silk. The web whines with the sound of countless mosquitoes and flies trapped in its folds.

Allen Dean, a spider expert at Texas A&M University, has seen a lot of webs, but even he described this one as “rather spooky, kind of like Halloween.”

....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/31/us/31spider.html?ref=science

(saving for my weird things afoot with Mother Nature file).

And as a special bonus:

Has a Mythical Beast Turned Up in Texas?




Aug 31, 7:18 PM (ET)

By ELIZABETH WHITE

CUERO, Texas (AP) - Phylis Canion lived in Africa for four years. She's been a hunter all her life and has the mounted heads of a zebra and other exotic animals in her house to prove it.

But the roadkill she found last month outside her ranch was a new one even for her, worth putting in a freezer hidden from curious onlookers: Canion believes she may have the head of the mythical, bloodsucking chupacabra.

"It is one ugly creature," Canion said, holding the head of the mammal, which has big ears, large fanged teeth and grayish-blue, mostly hairless skin.

Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 80 miles southeast of San Antonio. Canion said she saved the head of the one she found so she can get to get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing and then mount it for posterity.

....

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070831/D8RCA48O0.html

-------

(Yeah Texas, hmm.)

[TwilightGardener]

1. That bottom pic looks like a cross of a javelina or a wild boar and a coyote/wolf. Weird.

[Cobalt-60]

3. it says canine to me

but that's speculation.

[Irreverend IX]

2. That's a lot of webbing...

If this is a new species of spider that's just emerged, it could turn out to be very useful. If these spiders could be bred and used to create "web farms," it could become feasible to harvest spider silk in large quantities. Spider silk has more tensile strength than any known substance, including kevlar, and could be used to create next-generation load-bearing cables and body armor.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

4. dog with severe mange #2 pic.

the first pic really creeps me out though.

[skids]

5. Sorry Texas...

B.C. has you beat...


http://www.cbc.ca/news/features/spiderweb/

[kestrel91316]

6. "Dog", sayeth the vet. Possibly with some pit bull type in there,

and the ears look cropped. If it's truly hairless, it could be this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Hairless_Dog

No mystery. No chupacabra. I'm surprised the Mexicans don't recognize one of their own animals........

[Snazzy]

7. aw man....

No goat-sucker..... heheh.

Still, I swear I will maintain vigilance watching-over stories of Mother Nature thossing curve balls, especially in Texas.