Spiders Blanket Wagga Wagga, Australia After Flooding
Like a scene right out of "Arachnophobia," spiders have blanketed an Australian town with silk in an attempt to get to higher ground during flood season.
Intense flooding near the city of Wagga Wagga drove some 8,000 people from their homes last week, but it also sent millions of wolf spiders and their silk up trees, bushes and grassy fields, Discovery News reported.
The fleeing arachnids left a rare sight in their wake: an entire sea of silk -- and spiders -- covering local farms.
"It's all silver. It's like snow in the trees. ... It's all silk," Wagga Wagga resident Dennis Lane told ABC Sydney. "Just down the bottom of the hill from my place, the trees are covered in them. They're just all walking out of the water down the road. ... They were heading my way."
Wolf spiders, relatively harmless and common creepy-crawlies, can cast a single thread of silk to "balloon" themselves over long distances, according to Discovery News. Since millions of them cast their threads to escape the rising waters, it almost looks like they spun a giant web over the town -- but Discovery News notes that earlier reports that called them webs are inaccurate.
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The Huffington Post Andy Campbell Posted: 03/ 9/2012 2:29 pm