Imagine this, multiplied by millions.
Residents of Goulburn, Australia are experiencing a ridiculously creepy weather/nature pattern of late… swarms of spiders, millions of them, seemingly falling from the sky like rain and covering everything. They aren’t doing any real harm, except to people’s senses of comfort, well-being, and possibly their sanity.
One resident, Ian Watson, is taking the terrifying arachnid invasion in stride, having casually posted on his hometown’s community Facebook page, “Anyone else experiencing… millions of spiders falling from the sky right now?” No big deal, just wanted to check in and stuff, see if anyone else’s entire property was blanketed in millions of spiders. When asked for comment by the Sydney Morning Herald, he seemed only mildly peeved:
“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.”
It was beautiful, he said. “But at the same time I was annoyed because … you couldn’t go out without getting spider webs on you. And I’ve got a beard as well, so they kept getting in my beard.”
It’s worth going to the Sydney Morning Herald post to see the pictures, which are almost unbelievable. It looks like a miniature town, like from a train set, is covered in cobwebs, but it’s a real, actual, human-sized town that is inhabited by actual humans and the spiders that have invaded. In some pictures, the webs are so thick that it looks like snow coverage.
The mass invasion is actually a mass migration by tons and tons of baby spiders who move from place to place by “ballooning,” a process by which they shoot out a web to catch the air and travel to new locations seasonally or when rain causes their habitats to become waterlogged. After a bunch of floods, you can imagine that even more spiders than usual were prompted to flee.
But even while the spiderbabies are harmless and will probably leave once the weather warms up, it’s hard to think that it’s easy to sleep at night knowing that they are literally covering everything. Shudder.
(Source: Sydney Morning Herald via BroBible)