Spiders rain down on Australian town
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This sounds too horrible to be true, but we assure you, it's real.
Perhaps a bit TOO real for residents of the town of Goulburn, New South Wales, who have lately had to cope with what appears to be a rain of spiders -- millions of them.
Images of the massive reams of webbing left behind by the unholy horde have gone all around the world, and it seems the local residents, far from reacting as if this is normal wildlife behaviour, are baffled and appalled.
"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," Ian Watson, whose home was all but cocooned, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Although eye catching, and terrifying even for non arachnophobes, it is more common that you think, and is a natural part of many spider species' life cycles.
Commonly known as 'ballooning,' it happens when young spiders get up somewhere high and extrude enough silk to catch the wind, taking their near-weightless bodies aloft.
The Goulburn Post spoke to retiree and apparent spider enthusiast Keith Basterfield this week, who says this kind of behaviour is common in May or August, depending on the conditions.
“It tends to happen a couple of times per year, usually on clear days with slight winds," he told the newspaper. "I was on the Bureau of Meteorology last week and watching the weather for Goulburn and the conditions were just right.”
So if this is so common, why don't we hear about it more often? According to Live Science, spiders do this quite frequently, but it's rare for countless millions of them to do it all at once, and then all be carried to more or less the same place.
"In these kinds of events, what's thought to be going on is that there's a whole cohort of spiders that's ready to do this ballooning dispersal behavior, but for whatever reason, the weather conditions haven't been optimal and allowed them to do that," Prof. Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron in Ohio. "But then the weather changes, and they have the proper conditions to balloon, and they all start to do it."
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Oh my gosh! Australian Winter!
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