Millions of baby spiders have rained down in parts of rural Australia — and apparently it’s not as bizarre as it sounds.
“The whole place was covered in these little black spiderlings and when I looked up at the Sun it was like this tunnel of webs going up for a couple of hundred metres into the sky,” Goulburn local Ian Watson told Inga Ting over at the Sydney Morning Herald. He found it beautiful but annoying, he added, because the spiders kept getting caught in his beard.
Watson took to a private community Facebook page to make sure he wasn’t the only one being invaded by arachnids. “Anyone else experiencing … millions of spiders falling from the sky right now?” he wrote. “I’m 10 minutes out of town and you can clearly see hundreds of little spiders floating along with their webs and my home is covered in them. Someone call a scientist!”
According to scientists, the reason for the spider rain is because of the spiders’ natural migration techniques.
The first is called ballooning, wherein baby spiders climb to a high point and release their silk, which catches on the breeze to carry them away.
The second technique doesn’t quite have a name — but it is used during heavy rains and flooding. Spiders will throw up their silk in the air to escape rising water levels and hope to get carried away in the breeze. It’s this technique that causes the ‘Angel Hair’ effect (above).
While all this is so nasty (and so rude), the best news is that none of the spiders associated with this migration are dangerous.
It’s still gross though.
[via Science Alert]
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