How Spiders Escaped the Pakistani Floods

Sunday 30 June 2019

When the floods hit Pakistan in 2010 the first thing that many people did was to head for higher ground. So too did countless millions of animals, among them spiders. To escape the rapidly rising waters the spiders did the sensible thing and climbed up trees.

The flood waters took quite a while to recede. The result was that the temporary arachnid shelter became semi-permanent – and a spider has to do what a spider has to do...

The local people of the Sindh province had never seen this sort of animal behaviour before. Yet there was an unexpected – and welcome – result. Even though there were thousands of pools of stagnant water left after the floods there were rather less mosquitoes than you might expect.

It seems that the spiders didn’t go hungry after all...

Pictures courtesy of the UK Department of International Development on Flickr

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