A picture of some interesting web formations at the Loch of Banks on Friday 11th October from Derek Johnston – "lived in that area all my life and never seen anything like that before!"
Alastair Lavery knows a thing or two about spiders has replied. The photograph shows a mass of spider silk, more than I have seen, though I have been shown photographs like this for Australia and North America. The silk is easier to see on damp, still mornings when dewdrops reveal the webs.
This kind of spider silk is called gossamer. Spiders disperse by ballooning – small spiders climb to the top of the vegetation, spin a long strand of silk and when its long enough drift off in the breeze. They are carried passively, usually for a few kilometres to a new habitat, but they can travel hundreds of kilometres this way. Famously Darwin, observed the rigging of the Beagle covered in tiny spiders and gossamer when he was 60 miles off the coast of Argentina.
The silk in the photograph is unusually well organised gossamer and has the appearance of the sheet webs of money spiders, though it is too high in the vegetation and too dense to be webs. Recent research by Sara Goodacre at the University of East Anglia has found that ballooning behaviour is often inhibited by infection with Rickettsia bacteria. The bacterium infects a large number of spiders in the population and by preventing dispersal, increases the bacteria’s spread locally. In this case some spiders may have ballooned, but infected spiders produced web-like structure instead of ballooning.
Thanks to Derek for sharing and Alastair for the explaination.