How ghost trees arose in Pakistan

In the summer of 2010, one of the largest floods in the history of the country happened in Pakistan. The monsoon rains that came to Pakistan brought with them an abnormally high amount of rainfall, as a result of which the rivers overflowed the banks, and the water in some places rose to 5 meters.

One of the regions affected by the disaster was the province of Sind. Local residents and everyone who visited the country in the following years could observe a very rare natural phenomenon - trees covered with unusual cocoons. It looked very strange, if not frightening.

According to local residents, they had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps such a massive migration of spiders to the crowns of trees occurred because the flood did not fall for a very long time and the high water level remained for several weeks.

In addition to the unusual and mysterious sight, the mass population of tree spiders has brought some benefit to people. The fact is that mosquitoes - a real disaster of these places - breed in shallow standing reservoirs with warm water. As in neighboring India, Pakistanis suffer from malaria carried by these insects. But, contrary to expectations, the flood did not lead to an increase in the number of cases in the province of Sindh. Local residents attribute this to the fact that the spiders that settled on the trees helped to destroy part of the pests that were born as a result of a massive flood.

Such phenomena are extremely rare in nature, and what happened in Pakistan, experts say, is the only case of such a massive population of tree crowns by spiders. But such an invasion of spiders did not benefit the trees themselves. According to the researchers, most of the trees inhabited by such tenants began to suffer from a lack of sunlight and die. Although on some instances the appearance of unexpected guests was not reflected in any way, and they still live.