The residents of Victoria’s Gippsland region have been experiencing blankets of spiderwebs covering the landscape after a few days of heavy rain.
Flooding and heavy rain made the spiders leave their underground homes to seek higher ground and used a special tactic called “ballooning.” This is when they release a web that floats in the wind and catches on the grass and trees.
Senior insects curator from Museums Victoria, Dr. Ken Walker said that millions of spiders threw strands into the air and that’s what made the blanket. With so many doing it at the same time, it just covered any and everything in the area.
“Ground-dwelling spiders need to get off the ground very quickly. The silk snakes up and catches onto vegetation and they can escape,” Dr. Ken Walker said, according to BBC.
Photos and videos shared to Facebook showed entire fields covered with the web. When the wind blew and it hit the blanket, it would move around as if it was an ocean wave.
“It wasn’t scary – it was beautiful. Everything was just shrouded in this beautiful gossamer spider-web, all over the trees and fences,” local councillor Carolyn Crossley said to BBC.