That's not snow...those are spiders and you're going to shiver when you see this.

Meanwhile in Australia: Spiders rain down on N.S.W. town

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Daniel Martins

Digital Reporter

Monday, May 18, 2015, 1:29 PM - Residents of the town of Goulburn, New South Wales have lately had to cope with what appears to be a rain of spiders -- millions of them.

"The whole place was covered in these little black spiderlings and when I looked up at the sun it was like this tunnel of webs going up for a couple of hundred metres into the sky," Ian Watson, whose home was all but cocooned, told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Events like these aren't unknown in Australia, and have been observed worldwide. Here's the aftermath of one photographed in Albury, New South Wales, in 1974:

Although eye catching, and terrifying even for non arachnophobes, it is more common that you think, and is a natural part of many spider species' life cycles.

Commonly known as 'ballooning,' it happens when young spiders get up somewhere high and extrude enough silk to catch the wind, taking their near-weightless bodies aloft.

The Goulburn Post spoke to retiree and apparent spider enthusiast Keith Basterfield this week, who says this kind of behaviour is usually seen in May or August, depending on the conditions.

“It tends to happen a couple of times per year, usually on clear days with slight winds," he told the newspaper. "I was on the Bureau of Meteorology last week and watching the weather for Goulburn and the conditions were just right.”

Here's a shot of a similar sky-borne spider throng in Texas:

So if this is so common, why don't we hear about it more often? According to Live Science, spiders do this quite frequently, but it's rare for countless millions of them to do it all at once, and then all be carried to more or less the same place.

"In these kinds of events, what's thought to be going on is that there's a whole cohort of spiders that's ready to do this ballooning dispersal behavior, but for whatever reason, the weather conditions haven't been optimal and allowed them to do that," Prof. Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron in Ohio. "But then the weather changes, and they have the proper conditions to balloon, and they all start to do it."

IT'S NOT JUST AUSTRALIA: Hotels in Chicago are warning residents to watch out for falling spiders. See below.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this article and the accompanying video used images of previous spider-web ballooning incidents as depictions of the current event. This version has been corrected.



SOURCES: Sydney Morning Herald | Goulburn Post | Live Science