Why are there more spider webs in the morning than there are during the rest of the day?
Asked by
arnbev959 (
10908
)
September 13th, 2009
I’ve noticed that if I get up really early in the morning and walk around, there are always a ton of spider webs in the woods. The dew catches them and they’re really beautiful. But later in the day they are gone.
They are gone. It isn’t that they’re just harder to see. I made a study of it one day. At dawn I went for a walk, and noted the locations of ten of these webs. Around noon I went back, but I only found one of the webs. I could not find any trace of the others.
I don’t know what kinds of spiders these were. They were in the woods in upstate New York.
Where do they go?
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12 Answers
Spiders are active at night- people and animals and bugs that disturb them are not?
That, or I am stealing them from you.
You need to come to my house. They are everywhere. Seriously. I have seen more this year than any time before.
I’d guess because, throughout the course of the day, people/other creatures disturb and destroy those webs. Then at night, when it’s calm, they rebuild for you to see in the morn’ and to be destroyed again in the afternoon.
@aphilotus, You don’t have to steal @petethepothead‘s! I’ll be MORE than HAPPY to give you mine. But, you’ll have to come get them.
Because I knock them all down when I walk my dogs in the morning. I have to walk with one arm out in front so I don’t inhale them. Then I always worry if the spiders who lived in the web I just walked through are about to crawl down my neck.
I don’t know if it is the scientifically correct answer but I think @Sarcasm has it right!
Spiders tend to build their webs in the early evening and then hunt through the night. The cooler temperatures and higher humidity help to keep the sticky texture of the web intact – when the sun rises, the web dries out and becomes less effective at trapping insects. Many spiders will ingest the old web to conserve materials and some will leave the basic structure intact and just replace the “capture” threads. And, of course, the morning dew highlights the webs and makes them more visible to the human eye.
Like @syz said, most spiders are nocturnal, and many spiders will remove a used web to build anew the next evening. I wonder what used web tastes like?
@rooeytoo I have been secretly instructing the spiders to aim for the back of your neck.
What you see is the morning dew on the webs. Makes them stand out more.
So it looks like there are more in the morning.
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