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Spider Rain: Millions Of Spiders Fell From The Sky In This Australian Town

Derek Hunter Contributor
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It’s the stuff of horror movies, but it’s all too real. Millions of tiny spiders rained down from the sky in the Australian town of Goulburn, two hours southwest of Sydney.

The phenomenon is not new; in fact, it has a name: Spider Rain.

While the thought of millions of spiders falling from the sky and covering your property in webbing would disturb most people, Goulburn resident Ian Watson was more annoyed.

“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,” Watson told the Sidney Morning Herald.

The paper reports, “It was beautiful, he [Watson] 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.’”

Queensland resident Sharyn Munro compared the invasion to the SyFy movie series “Sharknado.”

The Belfast Telegraph tweeted a photo of a farm that looks like it just has a snow storm roll through, but that’s not snow, it’s spider webs.

“Spider Rain” is not uncommon. The Herald reports:

Naturalist Martyn Robinson from the Australian Museum said two migration techniques associated with spiders would explain why locals might have thought it was raining spiders.

The first, a dispersal technique called “ballooning”, is more commonly used by baby spiders, although some adults use it as well. The spider climbs to the top of vegetation and releases a streamer of silk that catches on the breeze and carries the spider aloft.

Spiders have been caught flying like this up to three kilometres above the ground, Robinson said.

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

“That’s also why the first land animals to arrive on new islands formed by volcanic activity are usually spiders.”

In some years, the mass migration of baby spiders means “you can have entire fields and paddocks and trees festooned with this gossamer or Angel Hair, as some people call it,” he said.

While this would be visually disturbing, Robinson says “Spider Rain” is nothing to be worried about, the spiders involved are likely not harmful to humans. “There’s nothing to worry about … They’ll all disperse once the weather conditions warm up,” he said.