September 2013 Banter

[wx n of atl]

ban·ter

 [ bántər ]   

 

 

1.    light teasing remarks: lighthearted teasing or amusing remarks that are exchanged between people

2.    exchange teasing remarks: to exchange lighthearted teasing remarks

Synonyms: teasing, mockery, joking, repartee, wit, chitchat

[mackerel_sky]

Did Wilkes get a new account?

[Cold Rain]

Man, did you shotgun all the new threads or what?

[jburns]

Did Wilkes get a new account?

Man, did you shotgun all the new threads or what?

Not another one. 

[metalicwx366]

It's not even September yet.

[Isopycnic]

It's not even September yet.

Thanks.

[magpiemaniac]

It's a weather board faux pas to start the October 2013 banter thread until after Labor Day.  I'll do that Tuesday.

[mackerel_sky]

It's a weather board faux pas to start the October 2013 banter thread until after Labor Day. I'll do that Tuesday.

. Lol

[jburns]

It's a weather board faux pas to start the October 2013 banter thread until after Labor Day.  I'll do that Tuesday.

 

You mean my tropical season thread was a faux pas?  

[dsaur]

Now I'm all confused.  I'm seeing triple and I haven't even started my lost weekend yet.  T

[dsaur]

All right, the spiders around here are going crazy with their spans.  I don't know what it means but it is definitely something new in 13 years.  I'm looking for a 5 inch sleet. These webs span huge gaps.  You'll be walking out in the open and get web across you...and there's a tree limb 20 feet over there, and a table 15 feet over there, and that tree 12 feet over there.  Where do they think they are going?  I mean that's like packing up and heading for California to a spider   And it's going on all  over a couple of acres anyway.  You get into 3 or 4 daily going to the mailbox.  I'm like Godzilla smashing freeways.

  The equation I believe goes.....take the longest span, take out half to account for spider time.  Divide the remainder by the sleet/snow ratio and you get 3 into 16.  Or around 5 inches.  It might be over the course of several storms.

  It's slightly better than looking at the stripes on a Catawba worm, as they are the wrong kind of worm.  T

[FLweather]

[metalicwx366]

lol

[metalicwx366]

You guys are dead. Damn we need a tropical threat or for winter to hurry for yall to wake up.

[kvegas-wx]

I absolutely concur with dsaur......well on the spider thingy anyway. I have never seen so many enormous webs and lines. Just finished mowing and i was noticing lines dropping from 20-25 feet up across to the air conditioner. At least a 40' run! Sure we see the big spiders this time of year. But the never ending traps around the yard are ridiculous.

[mackerel_sky]

I think if spiders build super- size webs and high off the ground, lots of snow will be found!

[CAD_Wedge_NC]

I think if spiders build super- size webs and high off the ground, lots of snow will be found!

 

Of course.......that's good enough reasoning for me.

[mackerel_sky]

Read somewhere , I think it was from that DT guy, that 1977 summe did not have a hurricane, and 2003 summer did not have 1 till Sep,and both winters following these events were cold and wintry for the Eastern/Southeastern US!?

[jburns]

Weather is boring but the catfish are biting.

 

[dsaur]

I absolutely concur with dsaur......well on the spider thingy anyway. I have never seen so many enormous webs and lines. Just finished mowing and i was noticing lines dropping from 20-25 feet up across to the air conditioner. At least a 40' run! Sure we see the big spiders this time of year. But the never ending traps around the yard are ridiculous.

Man, I'm so glad it's not just me   It is so bad today, I'm getting them everywhere I go, and one right after the other.  30 or 40 foot spans every two or three feet.  And I'm talking big super threads that won't let go...and they go for your head.  These are like Hobbit webs....I've started carrying a big knife, and I've got a machete out there in the yard, just in case.

  And I saw a bunch of catawba worms going all over everywhere...they just looked freaked out, and cold.  I'm thinking 3 or 4 feet worth of frozen...so realistically I could see 3 or 4 inches, lol.  T

[jburns]

Man, I'm so glad it's not just me   It is so bad today, I'm getting them everywhere I go, and one right after the other.  30 or 40 foot spans every two or three feet.  And I'm talking big super threads that won't let go...and they go for your head.  These are like Hobbit webs....I've started carrying a big knife, and I've got a machete out there in the yard, just in case.

  And I saw a bunch of catawba worms going all over everywhere...they just looked freaked out, and cold.  I'm thinking 3 or 4 feet worth of frozen...so realistically I could see 3 or 4 inches, lol.  T

 

In late summer it is estimated there are over 2 million spiders in an acre of meadow.

 

 

 

60-acre spider web baffles biologists

Millions of tiny spiders spin mystery in a B.C. clover field

Nicholas Read

Vancouver Sun

Friday, November 29, 2002

A warning: If the thought of tens of millions of tiny spiders spinning a

web 24 hectares -- 60 acres -- in size and crawling all over it scares

the wits out of you, you might want to tread carefully over the

following.

Because that's exactly what happened last month on a farmer's field near

McBride, about 220 kilometres east of Prince George.

For reasons that area scientists don't really understand, millions and

millions of tiny black spiders called Halorates ksenius -- they have no

common name -- became trapped in Russell Jervis' clover field and

started spinning webs.

Halorates ksenius is not a big spider.

"One could fit comfortably on a Smartie with plenty of room to spare,"

says Brian Thair, a cell biologist at the College of New Caledonia in

Prince George. (Or to put it another way, it's about as big as a capital

"O" printed on this page.)

It's just because so many of them were in the field that the web grew

and grew until at its largest, it was 60 acres in size -- as big as the

triangle-shaped field it covered.

Thair had never seen anything like it before.

"It was astounding to see," he said Thursday. "I couldn't believe my

eyes.

"From two kilometres away it looked like a sheet of wet aluminum. It was

the size of several city blocks.

"I have never in my 30 years as a biologist seen anything like this, in

terms of quantity of spiders and quantity of web. Nothing even remotely

approaching this."

Most of the web is gone now. Storms have ripped it apart. But during

October and into early November, Thair says, it was home to possibly

hundreds of millions of tiny black spiders that just kept spinning and

reproducing.

What caused the web to grow so large depends on whom you ask.

Thair speculates that perhaps because of some unusual weather conditions

in late summer and early fall, the spiders were unable to disperse.

Normally, when young spiders reach reproductive age, they spin a thread

of web -- a silk parachute -- which is then caught by a breeze and lifts

them into the air. It's called "ballooning."

The wind carries the thread, with the spider attached to it, for some

distance before dropping it. Where the spider lands is where it makes

its home.

But Thair guesses that because of too much rain or an absence of wind,

the spiders in Jervis' field were unable to balloon, so they stayed

where they were.

Then they laid eggs, which turned into more spiders, which laid eggs and

became yet more spiders.

Added to that was the fact that for some reason -- again Thair doesn't

know what it was -- the adult spiders failed to die, so they kept on

reproducing too.

And on and on it went until the middle of October when 60 acres were

covered with the web.

Robb Bennett, an entomologist with the B.C. Ministry of Forests

disagrees. He says the "sheet of gossamer" was likely millions and

millions of drag lines the spiders produced prior to dispersing.

Drag lines, he says, are anchors that spiders produce routinely to keep

them connected with the ground.

Bennett says these spiders -- what he calls "LBJs for Little Brown Jobs"

-- and others very like them, live commonly in the north and probably

emerged from the ground looking for the highest points in the field from

which to disperse.

However, because no one who saw the web saw any spiders dispersing, he

can't say for sure that a dispersal took place.

Nor has Bennett ever heard of so many spiders behaving this way so far

north. He's never seen the phenomenon himself, but does have a photo of

a similar event in the 1990s in Louisiana. Consequently, he speculates

that it may have something to do with warm temperatures.

Whatever the cause, Bennett agrees with Thair that it was extraordinary.

Jervis, who has owned the land for 60 years, has never seen anything

like it on his farm.

"The first people who saw it [in early October] thought it was frost,"

he said. "Then they realized it couldn't be frost because there wasn't

frost anywhere else.

"It just kept growing and growing. Like everybody else, I'd never seen

anything like it before."

Jervis plowed the field early this year, which meant that in addition to

the stubble a few young plants were starting to sprout. They were

covered in thick cobwebs.

So were the fenceposts surrounding the field. So thick, says Thair, that

he had to use a hunting knife to cut pieces of it away. (Comparatively,

a spider's web is stronger than steel.)

The field itself was translucent, covered with just a thin layer of web

that broke if you walked on it.

But on the fenceposts, where it was thickest, it was like sheets of

grocery store plastic, says Thair.

"You know how when you stretch a piece of plastic tight over a bowl,

your fingers bounce off it? That's what it felt like."

Matthew Wheeler, a freelance photographer who lives in McBride, spent

five hours one day taking pictures of the web and the spiders scurrying

all over it.

"The top of every plant and willow bush and fencepost was completely

capped with this white sheet," he says. "And the whole field was

undulating in a delicate way in the breeze."

But if that sounds vaguely beautiful, there was a point when Wheeler

said it was anything but.

"There were spiders crawling all over my trousers and jacket, and they

had started to spin webs over my camera bag.

"So I started to think about all the poison represented by all those

millions and millions of spiders out there, and I started to wonder if I

was being really stupid standing there."

He was never bitten, but the sight of thousands of spiders "seething"

over a fencepost is one he'll never forget.

"I've photographed all kinds of things in astronomy and nature, but this

was in a class of its own."

Could it happen again next year?

Thair doesn't know how the spiders were able to survive so close

together for so long. It takes a lot of energy and protein to spin a

web, so the spiders must have had a ready food source while they were

trapped in the field.

Thair doesn't know what it was nor does he know if they laid eggs which

will survive over the winter. But he intends to examine the field more

closely in coming weeks and months to find out.

Thair has no patience with anyone who might be grossed out by the idea

of so many spiders .

"People are taught to be afraid of spiders," he says. "That's

disgusting. Anyone who was afraid of spiders wouldn't have gone near

this, and they would have missed something extraordinary.

"Adults inadvertently destroy their children's interest in science and

nature by telling them to be afraid of spiders.

"They should stop."

© Copyright 2002 Vancouver Sun

[buckeyefan1]

In late summer it is estimated there are over 2 million spiders in an acre of meadow.

 

 

 

The photographer is much braver than I would have been   

[metalicwx366]

What the heck is a spider and a Halorates ksenius?

[buckeyefan1]

What the heck is a spider and a Halorates ksenius?

fyp.....watch the language....sigh    

[dsaur]

"Then they laid eggs, which turned into more spiders, which laid eggs and

became yet more spiders.

Added to that was the fact that for some reason -- again Thair doesn't

know what it was -- the adult spiders failed to die, so they kept on

reproducing too".

  Yeeesh...thanks for this...a lot!!  We got some kind of spider Woodstock, and an orgy, and spider undead zoombies that won't die....and they like to go ballooning, so they could come flying down here...'cause I know spiders ride the jet stream.  It's bad enough I've got Hobbit eater spiders, but now they are zombie spiders that fly.  I better get a lot of sleet out of this!!   T

[dsaur]

Burns..isn't the coelacanth a mostly extinct endangered species?  Should you be taking one for a motorcycle ride?  T

[jburns]

What the heck is a spider and a Halorates ksenius?

In Waycross it would be a tiny black spider.

[jburns]

The photographer is much braver than I would have been  

Want to go for a walk?

 

[mackerel_sky]

Metal man brought up genetics on another topic, so while on the subject, did anyone see the lobster that was caught somewhere up north, it was perfectly half brown half orange centered perfectly down the length of its body? They said it was a rare genetic mutation that happens about 1 in like 5000000 lobsters, just food for thought! Down metals way , they call em crawdads!!

[buckeyefan1]

Want to go for a walk?

 

 

That made my skin crawl.....ewwwwww!  

 

Metal man brought up genetics on another topic, so while on the subject, did anyone see the lobster that was caught somewhere up north, it was perfectly half brown half orange centered perfectly down the length of its body? They said it was a rare genetic mutation that happens about 1 in like 5000000 lobsters, just food for thought! Down metals way , they call em crawdads!!