LOS ANGELES TIMES - In time for the Halloween festivities, residents in the Bay Area and Central California reported seeing clumps of web-like substances hanging from trees or drifting in the wind last week.
The most likely sources of the spooky-looking webbing are baby spiders who use updraft winds to disperse themselves after hatching, according to scientists. These webs have been most prominent in Salinas, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Oakland and Berkeley.
Experts theorize that the web-like substance comes from a process called ballooning, in which baby spiders, about 1 to 2 millimeters long, use their silk to drift in the warm wind.
This phenomenon isn’t something Los Angeles County’s urban residents are likely to see, said Rick Vetter, retired research associate from the Department of Entomology at UC Riverside.
He said this process typically occurs in rural areas “because of the available vegetation.”
In areas where ballooning is visible, people shouldn’t panic about spiders falling on them or getting bit.
“Their biting parts are too weak to penetrate human skin and their venom is designed to kill teensy insects,” he said.