town overrun by invading spiders

[dragon]

Damn just looking at the picture meak me cringe and since all I get is a red x if I posts take a look. By the way that white stuff covering everything is not snow.

Thousands of normally solitary wolf spiders have blanketed an Australian farm after fleeing a rising flood.

Reuters reports that the flooding has forced more than 8,000 Australian (human) residents from their homes in the city of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. But for every temporarily displaced person, it appears several spiders have moved in to fill the void.

"What we've seen here is a type of wolf spider," Owen Seeman, an arachnid expert at Queensland Museum, told Reuters. "They are trying to hide away (from the waters)."

The Australian Museum's entomology collections manager Graham Milledge told Reuters that there's even a term for the phenomenon, "ballooning," and that it is typical behavior for spiders forced to escape rising waters.

You can watch a video here of researchers on the hunt for ballooning spiders from the safety of a hot air balloon.


A dog casually walks through the ballooning spider webs (Daniel Munoz/Reuters)Thankfully for local residents, the occupying arachnids are not likely to set up permanent residence, a la the 1977 William Shatner clunker "Kingdom of the Spiders." Weather reports say the flood waters in Wagga Wagga have begun receding, meaning that locals will soon be returning to their homes and the wolf spiders will also be returning to their natural underground habitats.

And it turns out the spiders are actually doing quite a bit of good while setting up shop above ground. The spiders are feasting on mosquitoes and other insect populations that have boomed with the increased moisture brought about by the rising waters.

"The amount of mosquitoes around would be incredible because of all this water," Taronga Zoo spider keeper Brett Finlayson told the Sydney Morning Herald. "The spiders don't pose any harm at all. They are doing us a favor. They are actually helping us out."



Spiders and other insects fill the trees after flooding last year in Pakistan (Russell Watkins/U.K. Department …
As amazing as this display may be, it's not the first time photographers have captured massive displaced spider migrations. One of the most famous pictures of 2011, above, showed millions of spiders and other insects in Pakistan that had formed massive web clusters in trees to escape rising floodwaters.

"It was largely spiders," Russell Watkins, U.K. Department for International Development, told National Geographic. "Certainly, when we were there working, if you stood under one of these trees, dozens of small, very, very tiny spiders would just be dropping down onto your head

run away

[Spoonist]

Wolf Spiders ...venomous - non-aggressive
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Venom toxicity - the bite of the Wolf Spider is poisonous but not lethal. Although non-aggressive, they bite freely if provoked and should be considered dangerous to humans. The bite may be very painful. First aid and medical attention should be sought as soon as possible, particularly as to children or the elderly.
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Spider Identification - an adult is 1/2 inch to more than 1 inch in body length - mottled gray to brown in color, with a distinct Union Jack impression on its back. The female carries it's young on its back.
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Habitat - this spider is a ground dweller, with a burrow retreat. It has a roving nocturnal lifestyle to hunt their prey and can move very rapidly when disturbed. Commonly found around the home, in garden areas with a silk lined burrow, sometimes with a lid or covered by leaf litter or grass woven with silk as a little fence around the rim of the burrow.

[dragon]

not lethal for 1 but there;s thousands in that town.

[Dragon Angel]

Welp, I did need some inspiration for some spider-infested mountains in my story...

That is a rather impressive, if creepily spinecrawling, sight though.

[Broomstick]

I read the title and thought "This has got to be in Australia". Yep, it's in Australia.

And a wolf spider bite is one painful son of a bitch.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Agreed on the bite. A wolf spider bite hurts worse than a bee sting.

[Lagmonster]

Leaving aside that these spiders are likely doing quite a bit of good in keeping what are probably balooning mosquito populations down, and probably not actually hurting any people, situations like this explain precisely why mankind invented flamethrowers.