Spiders Take Over Greek Beach, With Vast Web Spanning 1,000 Feet

Spiders have taken over a seaside town in Greece, as video shows webs coating nearly 1,000 feet of the shoreline. 

Beneath the vastly spun webs in Aitoliko, thousands of spiders can be seen crawling along bushes, trees and grass in video captured by Giannis Giannakopoulos.

The webs may cover an enormous area, but the spiders that make them are quite small, according to CNN. Called the Tetragnatha genus, the spiders are just 0.7 inches long.

The spiders' population explosion is owed to the hot, humid temperatures in Aitoliko. Thanks to the weather, gnats are popping up all over, and the Tetragnatha genus loves to snack on them.

And more food means more spiders. 

"It's as if the spiders are taking advantage of these conditions and are having a kind of a party," Maria Chatzaki, a biology professor at Greece's Democritus University of Thrace, told Greek website Newsit, according to the BBC.

"They mate, they reproduce and provide a whole new generation." 

Thankfully, the critters aren't dangerous to people. And once the temperatures drop, the gnat population will die off and so will the spiders, leaving the people of Aitoliko to reclaim their beaches.

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