‘Spider Rain’ as Millions of Baby Arachnids on Web Parachutes Fall from Sky
Imagine waking up to millions of baby spiders raining down from the heavens. It sounds like Charlotte’s Web meets Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs – only a whole lot creepier.
Yet that’s exactly what happened in rural Golburn in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
Ian Watson of Golburn told the paper that he looked up and saw a sky full of little black spiderlings and a tunnel of webs going up for hundreds of meters.
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An Australian naturalist said what’s called “ballooning” is a migration technique used by baby spiders, which climb up on a plant and release a streamer of silk web that is caught by the wind and carried away.
Martyn Robinson of the Australian Museum said the traveling spiders can go quite a distance, and that’s why there are spiders on every continent. They even land in Antarctica, he said, though they don’t last long.
Rick Vetter, an arachnologist, told the website LiveScience that "ballooning” is not unusual among certain types of spiders, but people just don’t notice it.
What is unusual, biology professor Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron in Ohio told LiveScience, is for millions of spiders to be blowing in the wind at the same time. He said the mass migration may have been caused by a sudden change in the weather that carried so many spiders aloft all at once.
The Washington Post says other incidents of so called spider rain have occurred recently in Texas, Brazil and another town in Australia.
Chart of the Day: Boosting Corporate Tax Revenues
The leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have all proposed increasing taxes on corporations, including raising income tax rates to levels ranging from 25% to 35%, up from the current 21% imposed by the Republican tax cuts in 2017. With Bernie Sanders leading the way at $3.9 trillion, here’s how much revenue the higher proposed corporate taxes, along with additional proposed surtaxes and reduced tax breaks, would generate over a decade, according to calculations by the right-leaning Tax Foundation, highlighted Wednesday by Bloomberg News.
Chart of the Day: Discretionary Spending Droops
The federal government’s total non-defense discretionary spending – which covers everything from education and national parks to veterans’ medical care and low-income housing assistance – equals 3.2% of GDP in 2020, near historic lows going back to 1962, according to an analysis this week from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Chart of the Week: Trump Adds $4.7 Trillion in Debt
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated this week that President Trump has now signed legislation that will add a total of $4.7 trillion to the national debt between 2017 and 2029. Tax cuts and spending increases account for similar portions of the projected increase, though if the individual tax cuts in the 2017 Republican overhaul are extended beyond their current expiration date at the end of 2025, they would add another $1 trillion in debt through 2029.
Chart of the Day: The Long Decline in Interest Rates
Are interest rates destined to move higher, increasing the cost of private and public debt? While many experts believe that higher rates are all but inevitable, historian Paul Schmelzing argues that today’s low-interest environment is consistent with a long-term trend stretching back 600 years.
The chart “shows a clear historical downtrend, with rates falling about 1% every 60 years to near zero today,” says Bloomberg’s Aaron Brown. “Rates do tend to revert to a mean, but that mean seems to be declining.”
Chart of the Day: Drug Price Plans Compared
Lawmakers are considering three separate bills that are intended to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Here’s an overview of the proposals, from a series of charts produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation this week. An interesting detail highlighted in another chart: 88% of voters – including 92% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans – want to give the government the power to negotiate prices with drug companies.
