Rain of spiders. Spiders rain down on Australian city

Large-scale flooding continues in Australia - people are forced to abandon their homes, and local arthropods are developing new habitats. Fleeing from the rising water, they entwined all the islands of land unoccupied by the flood with a sticky web.

(Total 9 photos)

1. Australia continues to suffer from massive flooding. Heavy rains have not stopped there for a week now, causing rivers to overflow their banks. Some areas are predicted to be under 9 meters of water.

2. A severe flood caused an invasion of spiders, which covered all coastal areas with their web, as if with white snow or poplar fluff.

3. Millions of arthropods entwined coastal vegetation in a dense cocoon.

4. Coastal fields, like a net, are entangled in a dense sticky web.

5. According to experts, such an abundance of webs is explained by the fact that spiders are trying to survive in flood conditions, forced to seek shelter from the rising water.

6. The largest number of spiders is observed in the area of ​​​​the city of Waga Waga, in New South Wales, from where about eight thousand local residents were evacuated the day before.

7. Numerous spiders weave webs around islands of land that are not flooded with water.

8. These are mainly wolf spiders, which, fortunately, are not poisonous.

9. This behavior of spiders is quite typical in these conditions. A similar phenomenon was observed last year during the floods in Pakistan.

Heavenly punishment, the end of the world or a miracle of nature? When spiders began to smoothly descend from the sky onto the small Australian city of Goulburn, people at first decided that they were imagining it all. Together with hundreds of thousands of small black insects, their web lay on the ground like a blanket, and soon after the unusual “rain” began, the fields and roads seemed to be covered with a dense layer of snow.

Local residents perceived the phenomenon differently: some ran to hide in the basements, others armed themselves with cameras and hastened to quickly publish pictures with enthusiastic comments on social networks:

"Everything around me was covered in these little black spiders. I looked up and saw a tunnel of webs going several hundred meters into the sky. It was impossible to go out without the web sticking to you. And I also have a beard, so the spiders were climbing right up into it,” says an eyewitness.

Some local residents even suggested that a horror film was being filmed in the city, but the explanation turned out to be not so frightening. Spiders travel this way - they change their place of residence, explains biologist Ilya Kamaev.

“This is not rain, but the settlement of spiders. Small spiders release a web and fly on it: the wind picks up the web and carries it away. Why are there so many of them suddenly? The fact is that animals have a so-called “population fluctuation”, during these periods there are a lot of individuals, they become noticeable,” explains Kamaev.

Moreover, similar things happen in Russian latitudes. The phenomenon occurs in Indian summer, although in a slightly different form, says naturalist journalist Alexander Khaburgaev.

“When you go into the forest in the fall, a sticky web always “sits” on your face, because many of our spiders squeeze out a long thin web from their abdomen, the wind picks it up, and they fly away on this “parachute” to settle in new lands It’s just that it’s autumn in Australia, spiders are in their breeding season,” says the expert, “And some vortex flows in one place swirled them all around, which is why it seemed like there were so many spiders.”

“Spider rain” is a truly impressive spectacle, but not at all dangerous for humans. The “web blanket” did not lie on the ground for long - the fabric, consisting mainly of protein, quickly disintegrated, and the insects simply crawled away in all directions.

In general, unusual precipitation periodically surprises and frightens the inhabitants of our planet - take, for example, the case of frogs in the Spanish city of El Rebolledo: in 2007, a tornado that arose nearby hit a frog pond and lifted its “residents” into the air. When the wind died down, croaking amphibians fell like a cornucopia right onto the heads of the stunned Spaniards.

Spider rain is described by entomologists and arachnologists as a "frequent phenomenon" observed in some parts of the globe. It represents the sudden fall of several thousand or even millions of spiders from the sky.

So what causes this phenomenon?

It is associated with a rather interesting behavior of spiders known as "aeronautics". Essentially, the spider climbs to a high point and throws silk threads into the air, after which it is carried away by the wind - sometimes hundreds of kilometers.

Arachnologists note that there are probably countless spiders flying overhead right now, which tend to land without much fanfare and then go on their way. Sometimes, however, thousands or millions of spiders decide to fly through the air at the same time, either because they are a single colony or because weather conditions force them to do so.

Other known causes of spider rain include floods and forest fires, which can force spiders to flee en masse to escape.

As an example, let us take a phenomenon observed in Pakistan in 2010 after devastating floods. Then millions of spiders, in order not to die, made a massive “air flight”. You might think that people would be angry about having millions of spiders rain down on them from the sky in the middle of a devastating natural disaster, but that's not the case. Most citizens were grateful for this, since the spiders ate the annoying mosquitoes.

In addition to keeping the skies free of disease-carrying insects, flying spiders also provide an abundant source of food for birds and other creatures. This, combined with the fact that spiders are often among the first to return to land devastated by floods and fires (through the same "air flights"), means that spider rain is generally viewed as a natural phenomenon that allows these food chains to chains will quickly and widely dissipate.

Every person, no matter where he lives, can see individual spiders floating in the air, but if you want to see spider rain - millions of spiders falling from the sky, then you need to go to Australia, since this is where this phenomenon is most common. According to a New South Wales resident: “They fly across the sky, leaving behind flakes of web that look like snow.”

Fortunately for arachnophobes, mass “air flight” is characteristic only of small species of spiders or those that were born recently. The reason is simple: large spiders are too heavy to be carried by typical winds. So you can be sure that if you ever happen to witness spider rain, you won’t even feel the little spiders crawling on your body. This is a big plus because most small spiders are not capable of damaging human skin with their bites, even if they are very poisonous.

So, for the most part, spider rain is harmless (to humans). However, this phenomenon could potentially damage crops if millions of spiders land in the same place - their web will simply block the plants' access to sunlight.