September 17, 2012 The accidental introduction of the brown tree
snake on Guam has resulted in a loss of birds and a subsequent
explosion of spiders. Photo by: Isaac Chellman. "You can't walk
through the jungles on Guam without a stick in your hand to
knock down the spiderwebs," says lead author Haldre Rogers, a
Huxley Fellow in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Rice
University. Rogers and her team counted spider webs in order to
estimate spider abundance on the island. In the wet season, the
team averaged 18.37 spider webs every 10 meters (around 33
feet), and in the dry season spiders were even more abundant:
26.19 webs for every 10 meters. Since there was no historical
data of spider abundance prior to the loss of bird communities,
the researchers compared Guam's spider abundance to similar
nearby islands with intact bird communities: Rota, Tinian, and
Saipan. In the dry season, Guam's spider abundance was more than
twice as large as its neighbors, but it was the wet season when
things got really wild: s