Spiders nest - Minnesota

[Tcterror]

Saw this bugger in my nest. Not a huge fan of spiders but my wife likes em around for pest control. Curious as to what kind of spiders might nest here. I am south of saint paul Minnesota and they took home in a flowering crab apple tree. This looks to be a rather large nest.

[MyssArachnomancer]

Looks to be a "Webworm" type of shelter, created by Webworm larva. Spiders usually keep their webs fairly clean, so it usually lets you know if it's a spider or a caterpillar.

[rwbabco]

I could also see this being a tent caterpillar nest.. Noticed a lot of them in Wisconsin lately.

[Tcterror]

The problem is, we can see silouettes of spiders walking around in the nest. Clearly arachnid.

[MyssArachnomancer]

You could always open it up and find out. I can tell you that no dangerous species of spider can make anything like this. Get photos of what you find inside.

[Ungoliant]

I can't see the spiders in your photo, but nursery tents are built by nursery web spiders (family Pisauridae), especially Pisaurina spp. If this is a spider's nursery tent, the mother may still be nearby. The spiderlings usually disperse after their second molt.

[Ungoliant]

This site has a great picture of Pisaurina mira's nursery web.

[Phil]

The problem is, we can see silouettes of spiders walking around in the nest. Clearly arachnid.

We do not have any spiders in the US that live communally in this fashion, and there are very few found in the world that will live communally in a web like this.

I believe this is most certainly some type of insect, and I would suspect it is caterpillars of some type. The yellow and black stripped ones used to absolutely destroy our apple trees here in WA. We had to remove all the apple trees it got so bad.

I would in all honesty wait and hope Eric has time to give you a more creditable answer, entomology is insanely tricky.

[Eric]

I would agree that this is the work of a webworm, probably the Fall Webworm, Hyphantria cunea.

Eric

[Mandy]

We do not have any spiders in the US that live communally in this fashion, and there are very few found in the world that will live communally in a web like this.

We do have some social/communal spiders in the USA (e.g. genus Anelosimus & Cyrtophora citricola) but none that I know of live in Minnesota ... however sometimes spiders that aren't normally social will congregate en masse and also just the hatching of an egg sac can create a webbed area like that (though this looks too big for a hatching). Here's the story of one of those spider congregation scenarios found in Texas, as written by our friend Spider Joe who was there in person documenting it - http://spiderjoe.com/giant-webs-2007.

Could easily just be some spiders crawling around in the webworm nest trying to eat the caterpillars, though.