This really does look like a scene from a horrific, science-fiction film in which spiders take over the world. Unfortunately for arachnaphobes, and most of Wagga Wagga’s population, it’s very real, and is the result of spiders escaping floodwaters.

In the town of Wagga Wagga – yes that’s really a town – in New South Wales in Australia, thousands of spiders have escaped rising floodwaters by moving to higher ground. Not satisfied with merely reaching safety, the eight-legged critters built massive networks of interconnected webs over raised vegetation. The ghost-like webs expand across huge areas and resemble eerie snowfall, the type of which you’d expect to see as the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic drama.

The tiny spiders responsible for the spectacle belong to the Linyphiidae family, and are commonly referred to as “sheet weavers” due to the shape of their webs. The cunning critters have developed an ingenious method to move to safer or better ground, they let out individual strands of silk which can be caught by the wind and they carry them to safety.

“The behaviour is called ballooning – that is how they disperse,” Graham Milledge, entomology collections manager at the Australian Museum in Sydney said.

“They often do it as a way of dispersing and getting into a new area but, in an event like this, they are just trying to escape the floods,” Mr Milledge said.

“They often land in the same place and that is why you get this large mass of them.”

Over 9000 residents have been evacuated from the area, due to flooding.

Milledge believes that the spiders are harmless to humans, but that does nothing to alleviate the fear of being caught in a gigantic spider-web and subsequently engulfed by a sea of tiny spiders!

[Source: News Digital Media, New Scientist via i09]