August 10, 2007: Stuck hummingbird

EHOWA is rarely linked by IotD but here's an interesting one. xoB finds this item of a hummingbird who was forced to remain motionless for the pics... when it got caught in a spider web. The full story from the photographer:

I'd guess that if the Hummer was outside it would easily fly through a web. But hovering up against the skylight, with no momentum, it just got more tangled and more tired.

Aww... I'm glad this had a happy ending. My favourite birds, bar none. I love sitting in the back yard, and being visited by the hummers as they check out my plants.

hummers are my favorite too

lol @ rex.

I've been trying to lure hummingbirds to my feeder all summer. No luck.

I'll have a breast...and a wing and thigh and leg--they are kinda small.

Is it just me or are those little girls hands kinda beefy?

Spider webs

No, a hummingbird cannot fly easily thru a spider web. Spiders catch hummers all the time. Webs have the tensial strength of steel. I'm sure there are plenty of pics on the web of hummers being eaten by spiders...

Really? I've never seen one of those pictures. We did have pictures, that a member took and posted, of a hummer being caught and eaten by a Praying Mantis.

Tensile strength of steel means nothing but the resistance to breaking with a steady straight line pull. Any vector from that state, such as shearing, all bets are off. Also, in order to have a tensile pull, the thread must be firmly attached. In the case of spider webs, it would depend on glue being stronger than the web.

The success of webs is dependent on the speed of the spiders attack. Larger insects and bees, routinely escape from webs, if the spider isn't available or fast enough.

oh crap i just tried to google "spider eating hummingbird" but i couldn't bear to look at the spider pics.

Well, I found one that was labeled a tarantula eating a humming bird but the picture shows it's actually a frog of some sort.
Hell, there are spiders big enough to eat chickens, but catching them in a web, is quite another matter.

Goliath Bird Eating Spider, I think the largest species of spider in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_eating_spider

Edit: Oh Jesus, don't stray far from that page. The pics are shivers on a stick.

Yeah, that's the one I saw the picture of eating the frog. Camel spiders are huge too, but thankfully, neither builds webs.

yeah, and the spider's probably thinking, "Son of a bitch; just when I thought I had lunch ready."

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Originally Posted by Dypok Goliath Bird Eating Spider, I think the largest species of spider in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_eating_spider Edit: Oh Jesus, don't stray far from that page. The pics are shivers on a stick.

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Originally Posted by Dypok Edit: Oh Jesus, don't stray far from that page. The pics are shivers on a stick.

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Originally Posted by Rexmons hummers are my favorite too

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Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce Tensile strength of steel means nothing but the resistance to breaking with a steady straight line pull. Any vector from that state, such as shearing, all bets are off.

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Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce Also, in order to have a tensile pull, the thread must be firmly attached. In the case of spider webs, it would depend on glue being stronger than the web.

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Originally Posted by SeanAhern True. But with a spider web, any force on it is going to turn into a tensile force pretty much immediately. To shear a spider web strand, you'd have to have some way to keep the strand pointed one direction while applying force in another. Since the strand is, for all intents and purposes, a 1-dimensional object, it's going to be pulled parallel to your force vector immediately and your force will become purely tensile.