4-acre spider web found in Baltimore building

Arachnophobes might want to avoid taking a job at the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Baltimore, a building that has become infested with millions of spiders.

While the arachnids themselves are not believed to be harmful, their activity in the plant has produced webs so extensive that they cover 95% of the building's four-acre ceiling.

Experts believe that there are 35,176 spiders per cubic meter.

"We were unprepared for the sheer scale of the spider population and the extraordinary masses of both three-dimensional and sheet-like webbing that blanketed much of the facility’s cavernous interior," said the authors of a study published in the American Entomologist journal.

"Far greater in magnitude than any previously recorded aggregation of orb-weavers, the visual impact of the spectacle was nothing less than astonishing."

"In places where the plant workers had swept aside the webbing to access equipment, the silk lay piled on the floor in rope-like clumps as thick as a fire hose."

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