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Spiders rain down from telephone poles in Brazilian town

A black widow spider couple clings to a web. Recent research shows that males of the species seek out recently-fed females for mating.

While many of us on the east coast spent Friday hyperventilating over Nemo, the poor people of Santo Antonio da Platina had to deal with a virtual rainstorm of spiders last week.

A YouTube video, filmed by 20-year-old Erick Reis, shows a veritable wall of arachnids hanging down from a series of telephone poles in the southern Brazilian town.

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"I was shooting an engagement party for some friends of mine and I saw the spiders when I was leaving, now in the late afternoon," Reis told Brazilian news portal G1 Globo.com (via Gawker).

The web designer was so shaken up by the spider party in front of him that he initially forgot his camera in the rain.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he added.

Marta Fischer, biologist with a specialization in spiders from the Pontifícia Catholic University of Paraná, told Globo that the spiders shown in the video are of the Anelosimus eximius variety, a genus known for its social nature.

"This type of spider is known to be quite social. They are usually in trees during the day, and in the late afternoon and early evening [they] construct a sort of giant sheet of webs in order to trap insects,” she said, adding that their behaviour is more frequently on display in São Paulo.

And while nature is a spectacular thing indeed, make sure you’re not an arachnophobe before clicking on this video. You will simultaneously start to feel phantom spiders crawl up your body and begin to see imaginary things speeding up your walls out of the corner of your eye.

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Not that this last bit is from personal experience or anything. It… uh, happened to a friend.