[imagesource: Matt Lovenfosse]

I’m not one of those people that makes jokes about burning down a house because there’s a large spider on the wall.

Spiders are great, as are snakes, but I really wouldn’t want large quantities of either descending on my home at the same time.

Sadly, down under in Australia, huge flooding across the state of New South Wales has led to a deluge of spiders and snakes doing their best to escape the rising waters.

One resident, Matt Lovenfosse of Kinchela Creek, spoke about his home being blanketed in spiders, reports Huff Post, with an additional warning:

If spiders all over the house sounds unsettling, you might not want to even come near the trees.

“The trees are full of snakes,” he said.

And maybe avoid boats, too.

“If you take the boat out over the paddock, they swim towards it trying to get on something dry,” he said. “Same with the spiders.”

Don’t use a boat in the midst of a massive flood, or else the spiders and snakes will descend on you.

Noted.

Some of the footage of spiders, in particular, has been widely shared:

Those are all spiders.

As are these:

Shenae and Steve Varley said they had also seen huge numbers of “skinks, ants, basically every insect, crickets” when they were out and about, with spiders climbing up Steve’s legs whenever he stood still, and a skink using him as a pole to escape the water.

Fun fact – the Australian Reptile Park warned yesterday that a “plague” of the world’s most venomous spiders could end up swarming Sydney in the days and weeks to come.

Below via CNA:

Residents welcomed sunshine on Wednesday after days of rainfall, only to receive an “urgent warning” to brace for an influx of the deadly funnel-web spider, which is endemic to the Sydney region.

“The upcoming warm weather and high levels of humidity is the perfect storm for a funnel-web spider BOOM in coming days,” park director Tim Faulkner said in a statement.

“With the incredible flooding that we’ve experienced across the Greater Sydney area, they have been forced out of their habitat and are seeking refuge in dryer areas,” he added.

It should be noted that whilst there have been 13 recorded deaths from funnel-web bites, owing to their notoriously toxic and fast-acting venom, there have been none since an anti-venom programme was introduced in the early 1980s.

Spare a thought for Melanie Williams, who lives in Macksville on the NSW Mid-North Coast, and is a self-described arachnophobe.

She told her story to ABC News:

“As the water was rising, the letterbox was going under further and further and I could see all these little black things on there and I thought ‘oh my God, they’re spiders’,” she said.

“Then I looked at my neighbour’s fence and almost had a heart attack. There were literally thousands of them.”

That sounds pretty horrific for anybody with a fear of spiders.

Ultimately, though, it’s the animals that are suffering the most, especially those that are less mobile, reports Gizmodo:

Experts are also concerned for animals that live underground, like quolls and echidnas. Since these animals dwell in tunnels they dig in the soil, they can easily get trapped inside their homes by floodwaters.

[Nat Blatchford of the New South Wales-based animal rescue service Wildlife in Need of Care] told the Guardian that her organization has already seen this happen to wombats, and another expert told the outlet that bandicoots have also been affected.

The chaos is hardly limited to land. Rescue workers have also found several hawksbill turtles washed ashore by massive storm surge in the ocean, as well as hundreds of baby loggerhead tortoises, which are an endangered species.

When you combine this with the devastation wrought by the country’s recent wildfires, which saw an estimated three billion animals killed or displaced, it’s clear that there’s an uphill battle for survival with many species.

Let’s finish on a positive note, with some animals that have been rescued over the past week or so of flooding:

[sources:huffpost&cna&abc&gizmodo]