Environment

The Urban Environment Is Creating Super-Sized Spiders

It's helping them spawn tons of spider eggs, too.
Elizabeth Lowe

Great news for people who perform LeBron-class vertical leaps when they see a spider: The unnatural environment of cities seems to be inflating these creatures like bulging eight-legged balloons, according to new research.

Of course the focus of today's study in PLOS ONE is already a giant, nightmarish ball of eyes, legs, and fangs: Nephila plumipes, an orb-weaving spider whose massive colonies can cover the sky with webs the size of circus nets. Elizabeth Lowe and her colleagues at the University of Sydney have been monitoring the species around the city as well as the 'burbs, and they've noticed a stark difference in the urban spiders: Compared to their bushland-dwelling cousins, they are bigger, pack on more body fat, and have heavier ovaries. That last finding suggests these guys are great at having tons of spider babies.