Spooky Spiders Rained From the Sky in Australia

Local Editor

Residents of Goulburn, Australia woke this month to find their town shrouded in eerie, silken webs, while millions of tiny spiders rained down from above, local news reported.

"The whole place was covered in these little black spider-lings and when I looked up at the sun it was like this tunnel of webs going up for a couple of hundred meters into the sky," resident Ian Watson told the Sydney Morning Herald.

His house looked like it had been "abandoned and taken over by spiders," he added.

Similar incidents had been documented recently in Texas and Brazil and nearby Wagga Wagga, another Australian town.

"Spider rain" happens when large groups of arachnids migrate all at once, using a technique called "ballooning."

According to a 2001 study in the Journal of Arachnology, the spiders would spin out dozens of silk strands at once so that they fan out and form a triangular parachute, allowing the clever critters to catch a breeze toward new ground.

Further, Rick Vetter, an entomologist at the University of California Riverside, told Live Science that many spiders use ballooning - usually just not all at once.

"This is going on all around us all the time. We just don't notice it, he said.

Spiders that live in the ground will throw silk "snag lines" into the air and use them to haul themselves up out of the waterlogged earth.

Accordingly, huge numbers of spiders escape drowning this way, their crisscrossing "silk roads" weave a shroud over trees, grass and sometimes buildings.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team