Spider Trees-Creepy-Cool

Enrobed in Silk

Photograph courtesy Russell Watkins, U.K. Department for International Development

Trees shrouded in ghostly cocoons line the edges of a submerged farm field in the Pakistani village of Sindh, where 2010's massive floods drove millions of spiders and possibly other insects into the trees to spin their webs.

Beginning
last July, unprecedented monsoons dropped nearly ten years' worth of
rainfall on Pakistan in one week, swelling the country's rivers. The
water was slow to recede, creating vast pools of stagnant water across
the countryside. (See pictures of the Pakistan flood.)

"It was a very slow-motion kind of disaster," said Russell Watkins, a multimedia editor with the U.K.'s Department for International Development (DFID), the organization tasked with managing Britain's overseas aid programs.

According
to Watkins, who photographed the trees during a trip to Pakistan last
December, people in Sindh said they'd never seen this phenomenon before
the flooding.

(See pictures: "World's Biggest, Strongest Spider Webs Found.")

As
for what exactly had spun the webs, Watkins said: "There wasn't a
scientific analysis of this being done. Anecdotally, I think it was
pretty much any kind arachnid species, possibly combined with other
insects.

"It was largely spiders," he added. "Certainly, when we
were there working, if you stood under one of these trees, dozens of
small, very, very tiny spiders would just be dropping down onto your
head."

Editor's note: Corrected November 30, 2011, after it
came to our attention that it's not certain that all the silk pictured
was spun by spiders.