Nature has provided another anomaly: #spider plagues in Tasmania: https://t.co/xLlq2djLkP pic.twitter.com/wmeIc9AX3F
— SouthernHighlandNews (@Sthn_Hland_News) June 8, 2016
If you have a touch of arachnophobia then what you are about to see is going to be like your worst nightmare.
A HUMONGOUS spider web was photographed in the trees near Launceston in Tasmania, Australia and it’s like nothing I have ever seen.
According to Mashable the reason for the giant web is probably due to flooding in the area as thousands of spiders seek refuge from the water.
Graham Milledge, the collection manager in arachnology at the Australian Museum, explains that it’s called “mass ballooning.”
“A lot of spiders do it as a way of getting around, because spiders don’t have wings, they can’t fly, so they float around on strands of silk,” he told Mashable Australia.
It’s a phenomenon most common with juvenile or smaller species of spiders. They sometimes do it individually, but people often don’t notice.
“Under certain environmental conditions you get these mass balloonings, in Australia it seems to be floods that trigger it, most commonly,” Milledge said.
Tasmania floods: Ballooning spiders fleeing soaked ground find refuge in treetopshttps://t.co/NtRzlagABC pic.twitter.com/biL86WZWMf
— ABC News (@abcnews) June 8, 2016
Local resident Ken Puccetti took photographs and what he experienced when he ventured out to take the pictures of the enormous web will make you shiver…
He told Guardian Australia “the plague” had been seen in an area covering about 800 metres and that “while taking these photos my shoes, legs and arms became covered in webs and I had to brush a number of small spiders off”.
You are a braver man than I am, Mr. Pucceti. I will give you that.
Want even more spider-iffic nightmare fuel? Here you go…
H/T Mashable; Spider image by Shutterstock