This is every arachnophobe’s worst nightmare.
Scratch that – even if you love spiders, you probably won’t love them in this scenario.
In Espírito Santo do Dourado, about 250 kilometres northeast of São Paulo in Brazil, a man captured footage of the sky “raining with spiders”.
NewsAU reports that João Pedro Martinelli Fonseca, who filmed one of the videos at his grandparents’ farm, told local newspapers that he was “stunned and scared”.
If you’d like to join him in being stunned and scared, or in my case revolted and terrified, then click play:
Here’s a closer look at the phenomenon in a video from 2017:
Plot twist – the spiders in João Pedro Martinelli Fonseca’s video aren’t actually raining from the sky. They’re moving about on top of a huge canopy-like web.
This, in my opinion, is equally terrifying, especially because spiders can ‘fly’ if they want to.
It turns out spiders can fly for hundreds of kilometres using a special trick called ballooning.
Spiders detect electric fields at levels found under natural atmospheric conditions, which triggers the act of ballooning. Experts have even figured out electric fields are what actually elicit the ballooning behaviour.
Lovely. I’m never leaving the house again.
[source:newsau]
