It’s ‘Raining’ Spiders in Australia [Photos]

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Millions of baby spiders have rained down in parts of rural Australia — and apparently it’s not as bizarre as it sounds.

“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,” Goulburn local Ian Watson told Inga Ting over at the Sydney Morning Herald. He found it beautiful but annoying, he added, because the spiders kept getting caught in his beard. 
Watson took to a private community
Facebook page to make sure he wasn’t the only one being invaded by
arachnids. “Anyone else experiencing … millions of spiders falling from
the sky right now?” he wrote. “I’m 10 minutes out of town and you can
clearly see hundreds of little spiders floating along with their webs
and my home is covered in them. Someone call a scientist!” 

According to scientists, the reason for the spider rain is because of the spiders’ natural migration techniques.

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The first is called ballooning, wherein baby spiders climb to a high
point and release their silk, which catches on the breeze to carry them
away.

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The second technique doesn’t quite have a name — but it is used
during heavy rains and flooding. Spiders will throw up their silk in the
air to escape rising water levels and hope to get carried away in the
breeze. It’s this technique that causes the ‘Angel Hair’ effect (above).

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While all this is so nasty (and so rude), the best news is that none
of the spiders associated with this migration are dangerous.

It’s still gross though.

[via Science Alert]

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