not cotton wood seeds afloat, but what?

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This morning, i noticed MANY white strings/strands floating through the air just as cotton wood floats about. this stuff really resembles a spider web as it sticks to whatever it comes in contact with. got the binoculars out and i can see that it's adrift pretty high so assume it's coming in from somewhere far off.

I live in Texas. any idea what this might be? Doesn't look like a seed of any sort, however it may be. perhaps a bug of some sort migrating? i've never noticed it before so whatever it is must've produced an abundance, so much that it's become noticeable.

thanks

-- Buk Buk (bukabuk@hotmail.com), October 14, 2001

Answers

if its just a "string",, Id say its spiders, baby spider will let a strand of silk go and catch the wind

-- stan (sopal@net-port.com), October 14, 2001.

Ahh. Stan you're right, thank you. the local news explained this evening that they are balloon spiders. apparently the many strands of web looking stuff caught the attention of many people. there must be an abundance of these little guys this year as i've never seen them before. it's a wild sight to see all these strings of web hanging off power lines, trees..everything. Wasn't quite sure what to think this morning.

-- Buk Buk (bukabuk@hotmail.com), October 14, 2001.

Buk. If you had actually read Charlotte's Web, instead of the Cliff Notes version, you would know that spiders can fly.

-- paul (primrose@centex.net), October 14, 2001.

I also live in Texas and noticed those "strings" yesterday morning when I went out to milk the cow. Some were 20 feet long. I'm glad you let me know what they were because my granddaughter was asking me about them. I figured they were some sort of insect babies that had been sent on their merry way.

-- Marlene (mleiby@caprock-spur.com), October 15, 2001.

Well, in the light of recent discussions on glow-in-the-dark ice cubes and such, I'm kind of hesitant to post this.

I have an interesting book of strange phenomena, which describes falls of 'angel hair'. It is speculated that this is ionized air sleeting off an electromagnetic field....surrounding a UFO.

Okay, little green (glowing or not) men aside, there have been historically documented falls of 'cobwebs' in October 1881 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was well documented at the time, but there were no reports of spiders in the shower of webs.

Charles Darwin, aboard The Beagle, also reported a shower of cobwebs while his ship was 60 miles from land. Similar storms struck Port Hope, Ontario, in 1948, and Montreal in 1962.

It'd be interesting to know if your floating webs had little spiders ballooning on them, if any of them come close enough. Inquiring Minds want to know, and all that.

-- julie f. (rumplefrogskin@excite.com), October 15, 2001.



Yes Julie minds that need inquiring need to know. Just kidding

-- David (bluewaterfarm@mindspring.com), October 17, 2001.

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