Perth Voice Interactive

SPIDERS at Lake Monger have gone into overdrive and covered a huge stretch of trees with their web.

Locals who regularly walk around the lake are used to a seeing a few webs, but they told the Voice they’ve never seen the trees so thoroughly coated.

It’s been a bad season for midges and Cambridge town council doesn’t use chemicals to kill them off.

That’s good news for the spiders at Lake Monger, whose webs are dotted with tiny midgie corpses.

We sent a picture of one of the small, spindly spiders at the lake to WA Museum.

Arachnid expert Julianne Waldock says it’s a “male long-jawed spider, Tetragnatha sp”, which roughly translates to “four-jaw”.

They’re an orb-weaving spider that usually spin horizontal webs over water, but there might be other species at Lake Monger contributing to the web epidemic.

The four-jaw spider is known to share its web with other types of spiders.

by DAVID BELL