There’s nothing like turfing the “world-wide web.”
A Polish homeowner said he nearly had a “heart attack” after waking up on Halloween morning to see that his yard was enveloped by a sprawling spider web.
“Spiders gave my garden a Halloween makeover,” Maciej Wąsiatycz, 28, joked in a Reddit post describing the arachnid metropolis, which cropped up on his front lawn in Poznań.
He shared a photo of the gossamer tenements, which completely carpeted his garden like a horror movie prop.
“We initially thought the webs on the flowers were from spider mites, so when I saw the entire lawn covered in webs after a few days, I almost had a heart attack!” the appalled fellow told Newsweek.
The arachnid lawn ornaments were likely spun by members of the sheet web family, which are known to blanket fields with their mist-like structures.
German biomaterial expert Thomas Scheibel told Livescience that sheet webs are made up of not just one type of spider silk, “but typically several silks with different properties.”
Wąsiatycz said he’s seen the phenomenon, dubbed “babie lato” (gossamer), in the forest, but “never on this scale.”
Despite asking several gardeners about the takeover, the homeowner remains unsure why the silk-spinning squatters decided to colonize his yard.
“My lawn is laid from turf rolls, so one of the rolls might have contained a large number of spiders or their eggs,” Wąsiatycz posited. “However, the garden was completed in August, so there was quite a delay before this happened.
He said that people advised him “to burn the house down and surrender the garden to the spiders.”
Indeed, Redditors were horrified, with one writing: “This would ensure you don’t get trick-or-treaters.”
Wąsiatycz says he hasn’t removed the webs yet as he “figured the spiders would keep pests away from the plants,” quipping that he now has “free Halloween decorations.”
“As long as they don’t enter the house, I’m not too worried,” added the homeowner, who said that he’ll probably take down the “website” in the coming days.
While the origins of this spider city remain a mystery, sheet web weavers have been known to balloon — parasail to higher ground on silky strands — in record numbers during natural disasters.
Upon finding a suitable landing site, the eight-legged exiles use their tiny strings to lasso the tops of the vegetation, which they then ascend.
A deluge can prompt millions of spiders to deploy their sticky lifelines simultaneously, blanketing fields in silk like an arachnid refugee camp, as was the case during this biblical exodus in Australia in 2021.
