DailyDirt: Spooky Spiders…

Surprises

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Halloween is coming up, so there will be plenty of plastic spiders and fake cobwebs decorating suburban homes. But real spiders have been known to swarm over small towns and envelope sizable areas with acres of their webbing. If you’re not too comfortable around spiders, you might not want to read further. But if huge spider populations sound more cool than creepy to you, here are just a few examples of arachnids taking over.

• The Indian town of Sadiya was overrun with spiders — venomous ones that weren’t known to be native to the area. Out of dozens of reported bites, two people died — but the deaths might have been caused by inept medical treatments. [url]
• An invasive snake killed off a significant population of forest birds in Guam, causing the spider population to grow to forty times that of nearby islands. Normally, birds compete with spiders over eating insects, so when the birds died out, the spiders had an all-you-can-eat insect buffet. [url]
• Flooding in Wagga Wagga (Australia) forced spiders to seek higher ground to avoid drowning. The standing water caused an increase in the insect population and also resulted in vast blankets of spider webs covering fields like snow. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: arachnophobia, halloween, invasive, spiders, swarm, venom