Millions of Tiny Spiders Spin Mystery in a British Columbia Clover Field

Too.. Many.. Spiders.. Upside? They were really tiny. Downside? There were 10s of Millions of them. Bonus ooohgy, creepy pictures at the link. Excerpts in italic:

Halorates ksenius is not a big spider. "One could fit comfortably on a Smartie with plenty of room to spare," says Brian Thair, a cell biologist at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George. (Or to put it another way, it's about as big as a capital "O" printed on this page.) A typical barbwire fence on wood posts surrounded the field about six kilometres east of McBride in the Robson Valley. Thair said it looked like the whole area was covered with an opaque, white plastic grocery store bag. The thin, elastic coasting was not soft and fluffy like webs built by individual spiders. There were about two spiders per square centimetre laying the silk, which first appeared in early October. Thair said the web showed great tensile strength - enough to put a handful of coins on it without them falling through. There were "in the order of tens of millions of spiders running frantically back and forth," but they weren't interacting with each other. It's just because so many of them were in the field that the web grew and grew until at its largest, 60 acres, it was as big as the triangle-shaped field it covered. Thair had never seen anything like it before. "It was astounding to see," he said. "I couldn't believe my eyes. From two kilometres away it looked like a sheet of wet aluminium. It was the size of several city blocks. I have never in my 30 years as a biologist seen anything like this, in terms of quantity of spiders and quantity of web. Nothing even remotely approaching this."

I don't really have a concluding thought, other than: If spiders made noise, they'd freak me out much less than they do now. And, of course, "Stupid bug! You go squish now!"