Believe it or not, Australia is under spider attack. Thousands of spiders and their webs have blanketed bushland in the Australian state of Victoria, after it was hit by heavy rain and flooding. The images have gone viral on social media with some calling the phenomenon a “spider apocalypse”. Thick blankets of spider webs in some places covered nearly a kilometre along the road.

So is it spooky or a natural phenomenon?

Experts, according to BBC, said spider-webs like these are created by a survival tactic known as “ballooning”. In this, spiders throw out silk to climb to higher ground.

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“Ground-dwelling spiders need to get off the ground very quickly. The silk snakes up and catches onto vegetation and they can escape,” Dr Ken Walker, a senior insect curator from Museums Victoria, told The Age newspaper. He added that possibly millions of spiders had thrown strands up to the surrounding trees, which has led to this.

Though the webs are expected to fade away in a week or so but because this ballooning silk is lighter than air, it latches on to objects such as treetops, tall grass, and road signs, allowing the spiders to climb up, in order to shelter themselves from the damp. Most spiders use silk to wrap their eggs. Another common use for silk is as a dragline. Every so often a spider attaches a thread of silk to something, like an anchor, so that if it falls, it won’t fall too far and can drag itself back up to the previous position.

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Professor Dieter Hochuli of the University of Sydney told 7NEWS that the cobwebs are a natural phenomenon and not an apocalypse. “They move to a higher ground (and build a new house there),” he was quoted as saying by the website.

Heavy rain and strong winds hit large parts of Victoria, which led to flash floods in the area. The storm has led to many evacuating the area and hundreds of homes in the state remain without power.

In the past few months, Australia witnessed a mice plague that threatened vast traces of the land of the nation. As a result of the mice plague, many residents had also reported mice rain, where mice are reportedly falling out from rooftops.