In June of this year, not long before the midwinter solstice, catastrophic floodwaters draining from the Gippsland Plain, in southeastern Australia, left in their wake an otherworldly phenomenon: Translucent spider silk, extending half a mile in some places, trailed over riverbanks, roadsides, and fields, rising into glistening spires atop highway signs and shrubbery. On once-humdrum stretches of road, drivers pulled over to stare, take pictures. When a breeze ran through the membrane, it rippled with the fluency of a tide surging in a mangrove swamp. Light trembled on the sodden turf beneath. How improbable that something so delicate, sensuous even, might remain after something so destructive.
To spot the creatures responsible, you would have had to draw close. Sheet web spiders—constellations of them—clustered in a cosmos of their own froth and protein. A mature sheetweb is rarely bigger than a contact lens; the spiderlings are best made out with a magnifying glass. On days of ordinary weather, millions live in the earth, but when threatened by inundation, the spiders abandon their belowground niches. Each fashions a single thread, a streamer, to function as an emergency airlift. Lofted up by atmospheric currents, and possibly by electrostatic crackle too, the spiders sail on the tips of their lines toward higher terrain, alighting, in time, on fence posts or treetops or ascending farther still. In 2011, a pilot reported crossing paths with clumps of spiders at 2,000 feet. In a departure from habit—wingless as they are—the sheetwebs fly. The tracers of their mass decampment, a strand of silk for every spider, settle on a scale so vast, so uniform, the result looks less like the work of animals than like something mythological or architectural: a mysterious Christo at work, festooning the landscape.
Denne historien er fra December 2021-utgaven av The Atlantic.
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Denne historien er fra December 2021-utgaven av The Atlantic.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
What Abortion Bans Do to Doctors - In Idaho and other states, draconian laws are forcing physicians to ignore their training and put patients' lives at risk.
Kylie Cooper has seen all the ways a pregnancy can go terrifyingly, perilously wrong. She is an obstetrician who manages high-risk patients, also known as a maternal-fetal-medicine specialist, or MFM. The awkward hyphenation highlights the duality of the role. Cooper must care for two patients at once: mother and fetus, mom and baby. On good days, she helps women with complicated pregnancies bring home healthy babies. On bad days, she has to tell families that this will not be possible. Sometimes, they ask her to end the pregnancy; prior to the summer of 2022, she was able to do so
Mapping Mississippi's Violent Past - I wanted to understand the forces that shaped my state's dark history. I ended up in Spain, holding an object I'd never known existed.
I'd come researching my new book, The Barn, a history of the 36 square miles of dirt around the place where Emmett Till was tortured and killed in 1955. The barn, which I first wrote about for this magazine, sits in the southwestern quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. The township has been home to the civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer; to the family of the Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest; to farmland owned by James R. Binford, an original legal architect of Jim Crow.
A Brief History of Yuval Noah Harari - How the scholar became Silicon Valley's favorite guru
"About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being." So begins Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, and so began one of the 21st century's most astonishing academic careers. Sapiens has sold more than 25 million copies in various languages. Since then, Harari has published several other books, which have also sold millions. He now employs some 15 people to organize his affairs and promote his ideas.
Boat Fish Don't Count
The wild, obsessive, dangerous pursuit of Montauk's biggest striped bass
The Anti-Rock Star
Leonard Cohen's battle against shameless male egoism
Rachel Kushner's Surprising Swerve
She and her narrators have always relied on swagger-but not this time.
Men on Trips Eating Food
Why TV is full of late-career Hollywood guys at restaurants
You Think You're So Heterodox
Joe Rogan has turned Austin into a haven for manosphere influencers, just-asking-questions tech bros, and other \"free thinkers\" who happen to all think alike.
THE LOYALIST KASH PATEL WILL DO EXACTLY WHAT TRUMP WANTS.
A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.
THE RADICAL CONVERSION OF MIKE LEE
IN 2016, HE TRIED TO STOP TRUMP FROM BECOMING PRESIDENT. BY 2020, HE WAS TRYING TO HELP TRUMP OVERTURN THE ELECTION. NOW HE COULD BECOME TRUMP'S ATTORNEY GENERAL.