COLUMBUS – The Main Street bridge is crawling with spiders.
Crawling. With. Spiders.
READ MORE: In the Columbus Dispatch
But this is no Halloween tale. The $60 million bridge that spans the Scioto River and connects Downtown to Franklinton really is infested with thousands of orb weavers spinning intricate webs up and down the hand- and guardrails.
If you pay close attention during the day, you can see the sun playing off the silk strands woven round and round on nearly every open span on the steel structure.
But at night, you can really see the webs, snagging thousands of flying insects that live in and around the river. (You can tell how successful the hunters are at night by all the repair work being done during daylight.)
“It’s the night lights there (on the bridge),” said David Shetlar, an Ohio State University professor of urban landscape entomology who toured the site one night this week.
“All the midges, mayflies and caddisflies go up to the lights. Spiders aren’t dumb — they go to where the food sources are.”
One is an arabesque orb-weaver, which is known for its graceful weaving. Another is something out of an arachnophobe’s nightmare — it’s called a long-jawed orb weaver.
Shetlar estimated that the bridge is currently home to 5,000 to 10,000 spiders. And likely there were more several weeks ago, before the first frosts.
Ohio Division of Wildlife naturalist Jim McCormac says that’s evidence of good health for the Scioto River under the span.
A $35.5 million project narrowed the river for the creation of a 33-acre park with 800 trees and 75,000 plants. McCormac says that allows for more insects in the area, and the spiders followed their food.