Australia: A Land of Baby Spider-Rain and Cobweb Grounds
Arachnophobics beware before reading ahead: millions of baby spiders were raining from the sky in the town of Goulburn in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia earlier this month. Spider webs or angel hair have been seen streaming for hundreds of acres in the farmlands and houses are covered in tiny spiderlings that seemed to show no sign of stopping. Houses looked like they had been abandoned and taken over by cobwebs.
As crazy as the whole ordeal might seem, it is quite easily explainable according to Australian Museum's naturalist Martyn Robinson. As spiders migrate to the Southern Tablelands, a dispersal technique known as "ballooning" is used by baby spiders to climb to the top of vegetation and then release a streamer of silk web that catches on the breeze. This breeze usually carries the spiders aloft, sometimes even up to 3 kilometes.
"They can literally travel for kilometers, which is why every continent has spiders. Even in Antarctica, they regularly turn up but just die," explained Australian Museum's naturalist Martyn Robinson.
Another way that spiders migrate is after heavy rains or floods. Unable to live in the ground after flooding, ground spiders climb up the foliage in the area to throw silk "snag lines" up into the air to haul themselves up and out of the water. The angel hair effect can be particularly dramatic after a flood when masses of spiders are using the same silk road-like structures to escape from drowning.
Robinson said:
"Everywhere a spider goes it leaves a trail of silk. So, if they use somebody else's silk line, they put their silk line over that. You end up with thick silk roads … criss-crossing finer silk lines to produce this interwoven shroud."
Residents are far from distressed about this spider apocalypse and they have even gone as far as to call it "ethereal". They seem to be amalgamating quite well with the tiny arachnids.
This phenomenon of angel hair has long aroused the curiousity of local and foreign scientists alike. It is now known as the best mode of survival for ground and baby spiders of different types.
Robinson went on to explain their adaptation to this technique as a means of survival:
"That's also why the first land animals to arrive on new islands formed by volcanic activity are usually spiders. You can have entire fields and paddocks and trees festooned with this gossamer or Angel Hair, as some people call it."
Seems like waking up to a mass of spider webs all over the ground was something that we would only have nightmares about. Roof-tops covered in spiderlings? Something straight out of a horror movie until we know that this is absolutely, a magnificent sight. Especially for those who do not get a chance to see snow-covered fields and trees spotted white after a sudden over-night chill, this is the next best thing... without the freezing temperatures, of course.
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