Squeezing masses of caterpillars to green mush

Spiders...yes, great clumps of spiders all over the place! They appeared about two days ago: tiny spiders all clumped together in large masses, recently hatched out and huddling together before they embark upon their individual journeys out into the great world. What were the factors that caused them to all hatch out on the same day? It reminds me of when ants or termites all take it into their heads to embark on their great mating flights all at the same time. Yes, certain environmental factors: temperature, moisture, etc., etc. blah, blah...but how can these factors determine these events so precisely? I found several of these spider clumps, all apparently hatching at the same time. I suspect that they are all the offspring of the common Neoscona sp. that is so conspicuous here in the waning days of fall when the cool nights and shortened days tell these beautiful creatures that their days are numbered.

I noticed something that I have seen before in other poikilotherms. Such creatures' temperature depends upon the external environment, and on cool days they often clump together in large masses which tends to raise and maintain a higher temperature than if they went their separate ways. I used to notice this is especially in web worms.

These accursed creatures used to infest my apple trees. I noticed that on cool days these caterpillars would mass together and allow their dark bodies to soak up the heat. I knew this because I would go around and... Let me interject here that I LIKE animals. Today I won't hurt anything unless they bite or otherwise feed upon me (mosquitoes and fleas come to mind). But at this time I would become inordinately angry at these caterpillars that would devastate my apple trees if I would let them. Also I loathe pesticides. So, as I was saying, I would go around, take the large mass of squirming caterpillars in my hand and squeeze. As their little bodies burst and released the green contents, I noticed that without exception that they were extremely warm. On warm days the individual caterpillars would leave the large mass and disperse in all directions, only to return at night or when the weather became cooler.

These little spiders seem to do the same thing. Usually these little "superorganisms" don't last too long since the individual spiders usually wander off, or balloon off in a strong breeze.

Ok, I finished reading my book on HTML and am ready to begin experimenting. As usual I seem to be re-inventing the wheel. I had the bright idea of making templates of HTML code that was commonly used which would save me the effort of typing all that obscure stuff over and over as I did my pages. Then I heard about HTML editors and found that this has all been thought out before, and these nifty little progs will automatically do most of the tedious work involved in writing the code out. Ok, so I won't be inventing the wheel all over again. But now I can modify and interpret the existing code that I do find!