Overview
- Published October 17 in Subterranean Biology, the study maps a web-covered wall section measuring about 106 square meters inside Sulfur Cave on the Albania–Greece border.
- The colony consists mainly of roughly 69,000 Tegenaria domestica and more than 42,000 Prinerigone vagans living in thousands of interconnected funnel webs.
- Researchers report the first documented case of colonial web formation for these two typically solitary species.
- Stable-isotope and gut-content analyses point to a chemoautotrophic food chain where sulfur-oxidizing bacteria feed midges that, in turn, sustain the spiders.
- Genetic and microbiome assays show the cave spiders differ from nearby surface populations, and the team is planning follow-up studies while noting potential protection may be complicated by the site’s transboundary location.