Buzz
Photo Credit: Nephila edulis by dilettantiquity, Flickr // CC BY SA 2.0
Arachnophobes, brace yourselves. In a small Australian town, spiders have been falling from the sky.
Take a moment to process this: Spiders. Descending. From. The. Heavens.
This eerie event, though it sounds like something out of a sci-fi horror film, is actually a natural part of spider migration documented by scientists since Darwin’s era. In Goulburn, Australia, located 120 miles from Sydney, locals recently reported witnessing “a massive tunnel of webs stretching hundreds of meters into the sky.” The town was blanketed in silk, resembling a spooky, web-draped haunted house as tiny black spiders drifted down like snowflakes.
To migrate, spiders release silk strands that are carried by the wind, lifting them into the air. While they can’t control their direction, they can travel hundreds of miles, sometimes reaching remote islands in the ocean (explaining their global presence). A 2013 study by a University of Hawaii physicist suggested that spiders might also use the Earth’s electrostatic forces to fly, even in the absence of wind.
Watch this (slightly shaky) video to see what a sky filled with spiders looks like:
Ballooning is usually a seasonal activity observed in small, young spiders, though larger adult spiders have occasionally been known to release silk and take flight [PDF]. These migrations are frequent in southeastern Australia and have also been documented in recent years in Texas and Brazil. No corner of the world is immune to the phenomenon of spider rain.
