A screen shot showing spiders hanging from power lines. YOUTUBE, ACOISACOISADA1
Brazilian Web site designer Erick Reis left a friend’s house last week and saw something spectacular—a giant network of spider’s webs covering the sky. Fat spiders, resting on silk hanging from power lines, seemed to float in mid-air. Rather than running away, Reis pulled out his camera and filmed the scene, launching a worldwide debate over the classification of the creatures, Wired reported.
The spider was originally identified in several news sources as Anelosimus eximius, which weave giant webs, but biologists quickly shot down this theory. “The spiders I saw in the video are not Anelosimus eximius,” Deborah Smith of University of Kansas told Wired.
She explained that the species is generally smaller than the spiders in the video and wouldn’t be expected as far ...
