Lake Tawakoni State Park Becomes a Star Thanks to Spiders

You may not have heard of Lake Tawakoni State Park, located near Wills Point, before now but since late August the state park has been a media star.

National news coverage–on everything from CNN to FoxNews to the Discovery Channel. The coverage brought over 3,300 visitors to this 376-acre park on the shore of Lake Tawakoni, 50 miles east of Dallas, over the Labor Day Weekend.

Why all the attention? Spiders…or, more specifically, spider webs. Not just any web but a truly Texas-sized web that spanned several acres.

“When I first saw it,” said Park Superintendent Donna Garde, “I was totally amazed. What ran through my mind was that this looked like something out of a low-budget
horror movie, but I was looking at something five times as big as what you’d see on a Hollywood set.”

Stumped as to the web’s origin, the initial consensus of arachnologists and entomologists who saw an online photo of the web sent by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department biologist Mike Quinn was that it may have resulted from a “mass dispersal” event. In such an event, millions of tiny spiders or spiderlings spin out silk filaments to ride air currents in a phenomenon known as “ballooning.”

Quinn collected a sample of spiders August 31 from in and around the gigantic web and took them to Texas A&M University in College Station for analysis. Entomology Department researcher Allen Dean identified 11 spider families from the sample.

Quinn described the Lake Tawakoni web as “sheet webbing” since it covers a large area of trees, which is more typical of a web spun by a funnel web spider rather than the classic Charlotte’s web, or orb web, like that produced by long-jawed spiders. He speculates that the park’s spider population exploded due to wet conditions this summer that resulted in an abundance of midges and other a small insects upon which the spiders feed.

Those wet conditions brought about the end of the web phenomena, however; a heavy rainstorm knocked down much of the huge web.

“So far,” Horner said, “we have been informed of webs of this nature occurring in Florida, California, Canada, Italy, Ohio and now Texas. In all cases, they appear to have been produced by tetragnathids, but have other species associated with them.”
Superintendent Garde said Sept. 5 that the crowds coming to see the wondrous creation had slowed to a trickle, and that they were not being allowed to access the nature trail due to the sloppy conditions.

“It was fun, but we were really tired,” Garde said. “The spiders are great little guys. They put our park on the map.”

For More Information:
• visit
http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/spdest/findadest/parks/lake_tawakoni/
• visit http://www.Texasento.net

Photo © Joe Pase, Texas Forest Service