A video is doing the rounds on social media shows a scene almost straight from the apocalypse with the arachnids falling from the skies. The clip came from an area known Espírito Santo do Dourado, about 200 miles northeast of São Paulo, where locals spotted the terrifying scenario. João Pedro Martinelli Fonseca, who recorded footage of the spiders which has gone viral, was spending time on his grandparent’s farm when he spotted it.
He told local news outlets that he was “stunned and scared” by the sighting.
His grandmother Jercina Martinelli, told local paper Terra Do Mandu: “There were many more webs and spiders than you can see in the video.
“We’ve seen this before, always at dusk on days when it’s been really hot.”
While it looks as if the spiders are flying through the sky, what is happening is actually a fairly common occurrence.
The arachnids are actually moving on top of a huge canopy-like web structure which is build among the trees over vast distances.
The spiders are Parawixia bistriata which are small and fat-bottomed and their webs can be up to three metres thick.
Thousands of the spiders group together to create a temporary shared web over night, and in the morning they eat their prey which can include small birds.
Adalberto dos Santos, a biology professor specialising in arachnology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, told the Guardian that the spiders are in no way harmful to humans and could actually be doing us a lot of good, especially in humid, tropical places such as Brazil.
This is because they catch, kill and eat thousands of mosquitos each night which could be extremely harmful to us.
Professor dos Dantos said: “They benefit us far more than they harm us.”