Spiders Raining from the Sky

Arachnophobes, run far away:

Residents of Goulburn, Australia woke this month to find their town shrouded in eerie, silken webs, while millions of tiny spiders rained down from above, local news reported.

“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 meters into the sky,” resident Ian Watson told the Sydney Morning Herald. His house looked like it had been “abandoned and taken over by spiders,” he added.

Many species of spiders can "balloon" by spinning out a couple of threads that catch the breeze and carry them miles away. But usually they do it a few at a time. On occasion, though, millions do it at once, usually because of floods or very heavy rains:

Spiders that live in the ground will throw silk “snag lines” into the air and use them to haul themselves up out of the waterlogged earth. When huge numbers of spiders escape drowning this way, their criss-crossing “silk roads” weave a shroud over trees, grass and sometimes buildings.

Hey, we had very heavy rains last night, and flash flood warnings. So maybe Maryland arachnophobes had best check the sky before they head out today.