World’s Largest Spiderweb

0:00 If the sun were to disappear tomorrow, these cave spiders could go on living

0:03 for thousands of years completely in the dark.

0:07 If you go right to the border of Greece and Albania,

0:10 you head down this dark cave and then you

0:12 wait through chest high water for about 50 m, you find something really strange.

0:17 This thick spongy substance that is everywhere.

0:20 It spends 100 square meters.

0:22 And if you look closely,

0:23 you find that it's teeming with a 100,000 [music] spiders.

0:27 This is the world's largest spider web.

0:30 But what's strange is that this cave is in complete darkness.

0:33 There is no sun, so no photosynthesis and no

0:36 plants or any other traditional sources of food.

0:39 So how can these spiders survive?

0:42 Well, things get even weirder when scientists looked at the kinds of spiders.

0:45 They found two species, one bigger one and one smaller one.

0:49 Usually the bigger one eats the smaller one,

0:52 but here they were living in harmony.

0:54 And so what was going on?

0:55 Well, they found the answer to both of these questions

0:58 when they looked at the walls of the cave,

1:00 which was covered in this white slime.

1:02 When they put this slime under the microscope,

1:05 they realized there were sulfur eating bacteria there,

1:08 which were feeding off the high sulver concentrations in the rock.

1:11 And kay flies would then eat that slime.

1:14 And so you got millions of kayfies which ended

1:16 up creating this near infinite buffet for the spiders.