© Tracey Maris/Storyful
A transparent layer of spider webs covers the grass in a New Zealand park.
Visitors to a New Zealand park recently found the grass blanketed not by flowers,
but by silk webs produced by what appeared to be thousands of tiny spiders.
Park-goer Tracey Maris noticed something unusual about the scene on April 16 and captured video footage of the gently rolling silk waves. The web blanket was approximately 98 feet (30 meters) long and as wide as 7 to 10 feet (2 to 3 m),
The New Zealand Herald reported. Webs covered ground near a soccer field at the Gordon Spratt Reserve in suburban Papamoa, near the Bay of Plenty on New Zealand's eastern coast, the newspaper said.
Initially, Maris thought the silk nets were unoccupied, she said. But as she and her family explored the webs' outer perimeter, they noticed that there were "little black things on top" —
spiders, numbering in the thousands, Maris told
The NZ Herald. "So, as you do, we screamed really loudly," she said.
Maris spotted the webs on a newly made tsunami evacuation mound, she told the news agency
Storyful. "There was a bright glistening coming from the top of the mound. It looked almost like the hill was sparkling," Maris said. The elevated mound may have attracted spiders seeking higher ground after recent flooding from Cyclone Cook earlier that week, Maris told Storyful.
Comment: See also: All but 23 of 10,000 bats in Durham, Pennsylvania bat mine have died
White nose syndrome: the mysterious bat fungus that threatens entire species, everyone else
US: A race to solve mystery of bat-killing fungus