Many people do not like the idea of having to live with spiders. Arachnophobia is quite common and therefore, no one would like to wake up one day and when leaving home, get the tremendous surprise that all the trees are infested with spiders and that at any moment one could jump on you. It would be a very creepy scene; however, although it seems that something like this could not happen, it really did happen. In this issue we present: the shocking plague of spiders that has caused commotion in the world.
The most impressive event took place in Pakistan. The spider invasion is not something new in that country. In the late 2010s, flooding in the various regions of the Islamic republic increased dramatically. Faced with inclement weather, the spiders had to find a way to survive. Like the villagers, they have had to cope with the flooding and overflowing of the Indus River, which has affected more than 33 million Pakistani citizens.
The spiders had no choice but to seek shelter
After losing bridges, crops, roads and thousands of homes under water, the arachnids were also affected, as their natural habitat was on land. The floods caused a health calamity caused specifically by stagnant water for long periods of time.
Despite the desolate situation, something amazing began to happen: the landscape began to change; the trees looked like cotton candy, something the Pakistanis had never seen before, the locals called them ghost trees, which were covered with thick spider webs.
Millions of spiders are adapting to survive the new climatic condition, as the water is draining very slowly. They had no choice but to occupy the trees and create an incredible arachnid sanctuary. The sight may look beautiful to some, but very creepy to others. The incredible images and videos have been shared massively all over the media.
To top it off, the ghost tree phenomenon has taken on a positive impact. The stagnant water caused an epidemic of malaria mosquitoes, but every cloud has a silver lining, as in the most affected areas, the presence of the mosquitoes decreased drastically.
“Every cloud has a silver lining”
Malaria can kill thousands of people a year, but because the spiders had now spread and created hives with millions of arachnids to feed, all the mosquitoes were trapped in their webs. As a result, the risk of mosquito bites was reduced and thousands of people now owe their lives to the spiders.
Not to mention the fact that the landscape has a combination of something spectacular and unpleasant, it was taken as a blessing by the Islamic people.
In the aftermath of the spiders’ adaptation, the catastrophe for Pakistan was helped to be less of a catastrophe, because if the ghost tree phenomenon had not occurred, the stagnant water would have created a greater spread of malaria mosquitoes throughout the territory. As usual, the villagers hope that the spiders will no longer come down from the trees and that they will continue to weave effective traps for these mosquitoes, even if this means that they have to live with an almost alien landscape.
But although it seems an isolated event, this phenomenon has been replicated in many countries, such as Brazil, where a rain of spiders surprised the inhabitants. This event was not triggered by floods, but by the high temperatures that the region suffers every year.
These insects do not fall from the sky but create a large web that is distributed throughout the area. This gigantic web created by millions of arachnids is intended to trap even birds, which will then be the food for the new generation of spiders.
In Australia, the villagers were not as lucky when the rains hit the region. The spiders did not seek refuge in trees, but decided to invade people’s homes, who had to leave their homes so that pest experts could clean them to avoid serious bites.
Another case occurred in Indonesia, hours before the eruption of the Semeru volcano. Millions of spiders took over the roofs and electric wiring of the region. The villagers took that event as an omen that something bad was going to happen and in fact, the eruption of the volcano was one of the strongest in recent times.
There are many other cases around the world, where these arachnids are forced to leave their natural habitat, either by rains, storms, volcano eruptions, drastic temperature changes, among other inclement weather. And, although for many people spiders are very unpleasant, it should be considered that these beings are capable of controlling other more dangerous pests.
Many such amazing phenomena occur daily on our planet, but no matter how much the mass media have advanced, not even a very small part of them have been captured.
