Spiders Covered Australian Shores With a Massive, Gossamer Blanket
In mid-June, storms pelted Gippsland, a region in Victoria that cups part of mainland Australia’s southeastern edge. Wind downed trees, and water breached swollen riverbanks and pooled in streets. The weather snuffed out power at tens of thousands of homes. But after the rain, a bewitching sight appeared along the area’s soggy shores: It looked as if someone had draped the landscape with gauzy sheets.
They were white, thin, and fragile-looking, and appeared to have been placed gingerly, like fluffed veils. Through them, passersby could glimpse individual blades of grass. When tousled by wind, the sheets undulated like billowing fabric.
The silky sheets were actually a spider web—really, a whole bunch of webs weaved by a whole bunch of spiders. “Because there are so many spiders making webs, the silk becomes like one gossamer blanket,” says Paula Cushing, senior curator of invertebrate zoology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and a past president of the International Society of Arachnology.
On June 14, four days after the storms began, Wellington Shire Council member Carolyn Crossley ventured out to survey a flooded wetland between the communities of Sale and Longford. A causeway had recently reopened, and Crossley wanted to check it out. “It can be a magical view in a flood, and it was,” Crossley says. There, Crossley found the webs affixed to nearly everything—trees, signs, fence posts, cars, herself. “I brought one back into the car with me,” she says.
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