Spiders Cover Shores Of Greek Town With 1,000-Foot Web
Oh, what a tangled web is being woven along the coast of a small town in Greece ― and it’s more than 1,000 feet long.
Reuters reports that giant spiderwebs recently started blanketing the shores of Aitoliko in western Greece.
The giant webs are spun by a very small spider of the Tetragnatha genus ― it’s just 0.7 inches long, according to Inside Edition.
Recently, the weather has been very hot and humid, which leads to more gnats and mosquitos, which are the favored food of these spiders.
More yummy gnats mean more Tetragnatha spiders, according to Maria Chatzaki, a biology professor at Greece’s Democritus University of Thrace.
“It’s as if the spiders are taking advantage of these conditions and are having a kind of a party,” Chatzaki said, according to the BBC. “They mate, they reproduce and provide a whole new generation.”
The result is that the local landscape ― grass, trees and street signs ― looks as if it’s covered with a whitish-gray net.
A spider population boom happens about every three to five years near Aitoliko. Greek biologist Fotis Pergantis, president of the Messolonghi National Lagoon Park, told CNN that the webs will likely be there until temperatures start to drop and the gnat population dies out. When that happens, the spider population will decrease as well.
Although neither the gnats or the spiders are dangerous to humans, CNN predicts getting rid of the webs will require a lot of dusting.
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
