Have you looked outside lately and seen all the amazing spider webs?

The fog we’ve experience the past few mornings causes moisture to adhere to the web and they really stand out. Have you noticed how some of these webs span incredible distances? They’ve been doing it in front of my house for days, and Wednesday I noticed it along Main Street just east of the Wade James Theater, where spiders have literally linked several levels of utility lines together to spin a line of more than 20 webs between the theater and the top of the hill.

My science teacher curiosity got me obsessing on how spiders weave these amazingly long web lines — some more than 20 feet long — linking overhead utility lines, trees, and house roofs, anything that will serve as a point of attachment for their stunning piece of engineering. Do they actually climb up there, drop a line down and then climb back to weave the main web?

Am I the only one wondering about this? I’ll bet not!

Google to the rescue! Here’s how those amazing arachnids do it, according to The Naked Scientists:

“The way the spiders do this actually is that they sit on the end of one twig or something, and they stream out this very long but very light thread of silk which gets picked up on air currents and it floats away from the spider. The spider is continuously testing the tension in the thread. When it feels it goes taut, it realizes it must have snagged on something. So it will then fix that end and go across counting steps – because the spiders measure distance by counting their steps, and it therefore knows how far away it is. It then counts back halfway, knows that it’s halfway back across and then drops a perpendicular. So the strand hits to the ground or some solid object, snags, and the spider again pulls it taut. That’s the middle of its web in a sort of T-shape, giving it the three points it needs to start making the main web. Then it’s just weave, weave, weave, and the web is finished. So that’s how it does it. Ingenious stuff.”