Mysterious Silkhenge Spider
About six months ago, a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology first spotted a mysterious web unlike anything scientists had seen before: Each one of the weird webs was a tiny sphere surrounded by a circular fence less than an inch in diameter.
The student, Troy Alexander, found the mysterious formation underneath a tarp at the Tambopata Research Centre in Peru and had no idea what it was, so he posted photos of the webs on Reddit. Despite consulting with several experts who made several wild guesses, from moths to slide moulds no one knew what built the structure, or for what purpose.
About a month ago, the researchers finally got a chance to go back to the spot where they found the webs. They searched around the area where the first ones were found, eventually spotting 45 to 50 of the weird formations.
They then spent day and night studying the structures to see if they could find any signs of activity.
"We were really hoping to catch something being made or hatching out of it, or interacting in some way," Torres told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. And they did.
One of their first hypotheses was that the blobs in the middle were spermatophores, or packages filled with sperm and nutritious food that would attract female spiders. But over the course of a week, they didn't find any signs of females coming to eat the packages.
Finally, the researchers removed three of the structures from a tree and put them under a glass. After about a week, the mystery was finally solved when two spiderlings came out of two of the structures, and later, a third spiderling hatched from the formation.
During one of their days of observation, they saw an ant approach a tower and then turn back. The web towers are found on Cecropia trees, which have a symbiotic relationship with ants, so one possibility is that the fence defends against ant invaders that live on the tree.
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