Hunting of "social" spiders turned out to be an unusual natural phenomenon.
Residents of the eastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais captured a cluster of spiders in the sky. They called this phenomenon "spider rain". The biologist explained that this is how Parawixia bistriata spiders hunt. This is reported by The Guardian.
Photos and videos have circulated on social networks showing clusters of spiders moving as if through the air. The most popular was the video by João Pedro Martinelli Fonseca, who, during a trip to his relatives, noticed that the whole sky was covered with black dots. According to him, this phenomenon stunned him, especially when one of the spiders fell into the car through an open window.
The boy's grandmother told local media that in reality there were more spiders than seen in the video. She confirmed that she had seen this before, always in the twilight of extremely hot days. In 2013, residents of the city of Santo Antonio da Platina observed the same thing.
Professor of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Adalberto dos Santos, explained the reason for the phenomenon. According to him, the spiders Parawixia bistriata lead a "social" lifestyle. They live in colonies: during the day they nest in a giant, relative to their size, ball, and in the evening they go out to hunt. Between bushes and trees, they weave a huge web of cobwebs - it can reach four meters wide and three meters high. Its threads are so thin that they are barely visible to the human eye, so the illusion is created that spiders are hovering in the air. At night, arachnids catch prey, which usually become insects, but sometimes small birds, and at dawn they return to their den.
Adalberto dos Santos noted that the poison of Parawixia bistriata is not dangerous to humans, and the bite sensation can be comparable to those experienced by people when bitten by a red ant.
Prior to this, spiders have repeatedly shown a wide variety in behavior. For example, in November last year, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Yunnan conducted a series of experiments on Toxeus magnus spiders, which belong to the Salticidae family. They noticed that females feed their young with milk for the first 40 days of their lives.
Promotional video:
Alexey Evglevsky
