DailyDirt: Spooky Spiders...
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]
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: arachnophobia, halloween, invasive, spiders, swarm, venom
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Wagga Wagga!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Wagga Wagga!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Wagga Wagga!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]