Residents in three California counties on Wednesday found themselves in a sticky situation as spider webs rained down from the sky.
Images and video posted to social media shows the web-like substance floating through the air and hanging from street signs and power lines.
The plethora of webs – which fell on Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties – were actually the result of two factors: spider-hatching season and high winds, experts tell SFGATE.
Most freshly-hatched spiders use a process called ballooning, which involves using their webbings like a paraglider, to go their separate ways, experts say. It's an evolutionary behavior to insure hatchlings don't compete for food sources from where they were born.
Because Wednesday's winds came in from the east and blew across the mountains, it picked up hundreds of thousands of the airborne spiders and deposited them throughout the tri-county area, according to wildlife officials.
While ballooning is common in California in early fall, experts aren't sure which type of spider is responsible for the recent event -- or even if more than one species could be involved.
"If you pick it up, it's clearly silk," Fredrick Larabee, a Ph.D. assistant professor of biological sciences at San Jose State, told SFGATE. "What spider is doing this? I don't know... it's impossible to directly connect something to a spider without finding the spider."
Stephen Tahija, owner of Next Generation Pest Control, wasn't surprised to hear reports of floating webs everywhere.
"It's abnormal for sure, but also every year we have a major increase in a different pest depending on the type of weather we have had," Tahija told The Sacramento Bee. "Spiders have been absolutely crazy this year."
Experts say the webs might be messy but they're harmless and usually don't contain the spider still when found.