The rumble gets louder and louder, starting to make the hairs on the spider's back stand up, pressure building in its ears like a concrete saw bearing down. It can't take it anymore.

The spider mother emerges from her bark into the daylight, agitated beyond sense, lashing out at any movement, completely irrational in her actions and unable to stop herself from moving towards the vibration.

It is coming from a 4WD.

Dr Robert Raven is an arachnologist with the Queensland Museum and has not only witnessed floods of spiders running towards 4WDs, but uses it in order to study spiders in the environment.

"Vibration is a medium by which a lot of communication occurs in the animal kingdom," Dr Raven says.

"The week before the earthquake in Aceh, all of the hooved animals moved up into the hills, they could feel the vibration coming.

"We know that elephants can actually sense vibration over hundreds of kilometres. And they can detect who sent it and what it's about."

Vibrations, whether they're natural from earthquakes or humanmade from things like seismic testing underwater, can agitate animals, charm worms out of the ground, mess up animals' internal navigation systems and even lead to their death.

In the case of arachnids like spiders, vibrations seem to arouse their senses and make them agitated enough to put aside their normal self-preservation instincts to run towards danger.

The vibrations seem to arouse the senses of spiders and trigger irrational behaviour. ( ABC: Corey Hague )

"I deliberately got an old diesel in order to get this effect. Because the new ones are too sweet and smooth," says Dr Raven, who studies arachnids in Australia.

"When you let one of these old diesels idle for example on sand on a hot day, spiders that normally will not move in the daylight, are running towards the car. They are highly disturbed.

"I think what they're doing is they're running towards the zero point between the four wheels."

Sorry, this audio has expired Eight legged wonder of the world

The zero point would act like the eye of the vibration storm — a place of calm in among the nauseating vibrations.

"We get higher species numbers by that method alone, than we do by any other single method of collecting by eye, by trap, by spraying anything," Dr Raven says.

"This is the best way, because you get things coming out from holes in the ground, you get them coming out from under bark in the tree, coming down the tree.

"It is like [Brisbane's] Queen Street Mall — these things were just thundering past — these giant spiders walking across the ground towards the car. It was just an amazing sort of an event.

Dr Raven's work at the museum means he fields enquiries form the public who have unwittingly caused a major spider disturbance.

"It's a very easy event and we don't fully appreciate it," he said.

"One lady, who was preparing to sue a school because she found a wolf spider on a backpack of her son … I said to her, 'do you own a 4WD diesel?'.

"'Did you leave it idling for a little while this morning?'.

"'Were you watching me?' she asked."

The 4WD had been left in the driveway idling and her son's backpack was nearby on the ground. The wolf spider had become so distressed by the vibrations that it ran towards the car and unwittingly hitched a ride to school on the bag.

"She was very embarrassed but amazed," Dr Raven says.