The Baltimore Wastewater Treatment Plant had an "extreme spider" call for help that involved over 107 million spiders and a four-acre web.
"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," the scientists who answered the "extreme spider" call for help said in a statement. "Far greater in magnitude than any previously recorded aggregation of orb-weavers, the visual impact of the spectacle was 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."
The web was so unusual that the scientists published a paper on it in the 56th edition of the American Entomologist.
The spider web was so dense that it pulled 8-foot-long lighting fixtures out of place, reports Wired. The scientists also determined that the web took up 95 percent of the space in the building.
Although it's not every day that you see a four-acre spider web (the size of three football fields), the spiders likely originally came together for one reason - the sewage treatment plant probably had a lot of flies, which are below spiders on the food-chain.
