Hiya! Good to see you spiralling down from cyberspace...and landing right next to the coffeepot. How you manage that day after day, I'll never know. Fill your mug and grab a handful of virtual treats as I tell you about something else falling from the sky...in Oz!
Earlier this month, the residents of Goulburn – a small
town in Australia’s Southern Tablelands – were spooked to discover their
properties blanketed by millions of tiny spiders and mounds of their
silky threads. The spiders had apparently rained down from the sky,
silken thread and all, a phenomenon known as “Angel Rain”.
“Anyone else experiencing this Angel Hair or maybe aka
millions of spiders falling from the sky right now?” wrote resident Ian
Watson on the Goulburn Community Forum Facebook page. “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!”
That sounds positively frightful, but experts say that
arachnid rains are actually a natural phenomenon, and not as uncommon as
you’d think. It is referred to as ‘spider rain’ or ‘angel hair’ in
scientific circles, and is actually a form of spider transportation
called ‘ballooning’.
Ballooning is a not-uncommon behavior of many spiders,”
retired arachnologist Rick Vetter told LiveScience. “They climb some
high area and stick their butts up in the air and release silk. Then
they just take off. This is going on around us all the time. We just
don’t notice it.”
It’s understandable that we never notice spiders
ballooning, because they’re not always doing it at the same time and in
the same place.
What’s happened in the Southern Tablelands is that
millions of spiders started ballooning at once, naturally creeping out
residents.
“In these kinds of events [spider rains], what’s thought
to be going on is that there’s a whole cohort of spiders that’s ready to
do this ballooning dispersal behavior, but for whatever reason, the
weather conditions haven’t been optimal and allowed them to do that. But
then the weather changes, and they have the proper conditions to
balloon, and they all start to do it,” said biology professor Todd
Blackledge of the University of Akron in Ohio.
He added that certain species of small spiders and tiny
hatchlings of larger spiders generally balloon in May and August in New
South Wales. But an abrupt weather change this month may have carried
the migrating spiders up and away, and then back down to earth in large
groups.
“They fly through the sky and then we see these falls of spider
webs that almost look as if it’s snowing,” South Australian retiree
Keith Basterfield told Gouburn Post. “We see these vast areas of baby
spiders, all coming down at once in the late morning or early afternoon.
You can know this has happened by either seeing it or spotting what
looks like long threads of cotton telegraph poles, power lines and
houses.”
Thankfully, none of the ballooning spiders are poisonous
or pose a threat to humans. “There’s a tiny, tiny number of species that
have venom that’s actually dangerous to people. And even then, if these
are juvenile spiders, they’re going to be too small to even bite, in
all likelihood,” Blackledge told LiveScience. He did add that such a
huge group of spiders could block sunlight, causing damage to crops.
While the bizarre phenomenon has a scientific explanation,
having your entire town shrouded in spider webs is surely a surreal
experience. Ian Watson, who was later interviewed by the media, said:
“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. But at the same time I was
annoyed because you couldn’t go out without getting spider webs on you.
And I’ve got a beard as well, so they kept getting in my beard.”
Interestingly, there’s a phenomenon opposite to Angel
Hair, which can occur at around the same time as ballooning, after heavy
rains or a flood.
“When the ground gets waterlogged, the spiders that
live either on the surface of the ground or in the burrows in the
ground, come up into the foliage to avoid drowning,” said Australian
naturalist Martyn Robinson. These ground spiders also throw silk ‘snag
lines’ up into the air, and when they catch, use the lines to come up
from the ground to avoid drowning. “You end up with thick silk roads,
criss-crossing finer silk lines to to produce this interwoven shroud.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Robinson said. “They’ll all disperse once the weather conditions warm up.”
if you are interested in more information on how spiders get themselves airborne, here’s a video explaining the fascinating Angel Rain phenomenon:
Ah, sorry but the thought of spiders dropping from the sky does little to help my arachnophobia!
See ya, eh!
Bob
