It must be...

Did you see the story about the massive 'communal' spider web in Texas? It's a mosquito trap, and it covers a 200-yard stretch of trail in a park. According to the article, it was white when it was first built but is now brown with mosquito carcasses.

I don't know about you, but I would give up hiking forever if I happened upon such a thing. Nightmares are inspired by lesser evidence of spiders than this.

It used to be that everything unexplainable was attributed to Aliens - the outer space sort of aliens, I mean. "What else could it have been?" we'd ask. (The modern-day alien-explanation equivalent is 'Global Warming' but that's another story.) And I think I'd rather it WAS aliens than to think that a group of spiders could just decide to take over a park. So how DO you explain this? What were they thinking? Just how many mosquitoes did they think they needed? So much for the myth about the balance of nature! Is this just a little OCD behavior? One little spider on a binge? Nature's response to the obesity epidemic? Clean-up time? Boredom? Lack of spider predators?

Oooh. I shudder to think.