PICTURED: The bizarre town which woke-up COVERED in giant spiders’ webs

PICTURED: The bizarre town which woke-up COVERED in giant spiders’ webs

... Excerpt

 

May, 2015

 

 THIS is the eerie scene residents of a rural town awoke to after it literally rained spider webs.

 

 

At first glance the phenomena resembles a touch of frost or light dusting of snow, but it is actually fields and fields of inter locked spider webs filled with the arachnids.

 

The jaw-dropping sight was the result of a migration technique that has seen some hapless spider colonies end up frozen to death.

 

Goulburn in New South Wales, Australia, is making headlines after several agricultural fields were affected by the spectacle also called "Angel Hair".

 

Some observers even suspected aliens may be involved.

 

Goulburn resident Ian Watson said he was inundated by spiders and webs.

 

He said: “It was beautiful, 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.

 

“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.”

 

Some thought frosts had arrived at first

 

So what causes it?

 

 Naturalist Martyn Robinson from the Australian Museum said there were two types of spider migration happening.

 

He said: "The first, called ballooning involves spiders climbing to the top of vegetation and releasing a streamer of silk that catches the wind and transports the spider like a parachute.

 

“They can literally travel for kilometres, which is why every continent has spiders. Even in Antarctica they regularly turn up but just die.”

 

The second time it is seen is usually after heavy rain or flooding and the creatures use it as a way of avoiding death.

 

They fire silk “rope lines” into the air onto high objects, which they use to haul themselves out of the threatening waterlogged terrain.

 

Rick Vetter, a retired arachnologist from the University of California, told Live Science the event occurred “all the time”.