A video shot in Brazil appears to show hundreds of spiders falling from the sky in a chilling likeness of some apocalyptic omen or horror film plot. In fact, they are just perched on a giant, sky-spanning web, so rest easy.
(If that doesn’t quite reassure you, you’re not alone.)
The spiders in the video are actually crawling around on an enormous shared web between trees they weave cooperatively to hunt in hot and humid conditions. Called parawixia bistriata, the species is actually rather harmless – to humans, at least, if not to their sanity.
Shot in Espirito Santo do Dourado, the clip doesn’t really do the phenomenon justice, according to Jercina Martinelli, who lives in the region and has witnessed the spider invasion in person many times: “There were many more webs and spiders than you can see in the video,” she told Terra do Mandu.
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Biologist Thaiz Moreira says female spiders weave the webs to increase the area available for catching food, and that high heat and humidity are ideal conditions for construction because they allow the spiders to hang the strands more evenly.
It’s hard to pick which would be more unsettling – spiders raining from the sky or spiders spinning a web that covers the sky – so here’s another fun fact: they can fly. Using electric fields in the atmosphere, they can travel hundreds of kilometers through the air. To your house.
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