WE MIGHT COMPLAIN about the frequent bouts of wind and rain here in Ireland, but an Australian town was last week the subject of a far more unpleasant weather phenomenon – raining spiders.
Thousands of tiny spiders took to the skies in a common migration technique known as ballooning.
This is where the spider climbs to a high point, and release silk threads that form a parachute, carrying them away on the breeze.
Goulburn, a town in New South Wales, witnessed this on a massive scale.
The Age reports that the town appeared to have been “invaded by spiders”, with many areas covered in these abandoned silk parachutes.
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“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,” local resident Ian Watson told the paper.
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.
Martyn Robinson, a naturalist with the Australian Museum, explained that spiders use this ballooning technique either when they first hatch, or to escape floods.
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