It sounds like something straight out of a Hollywood horror movie, but it’s really happening.
A town in India has been overrun by swarms of deadly, venomous spiders, leaving two people dead after being bitten.
Residents of the town of Sadiya, say that on the evening of May 8th, as they were celebrating a Hindu festival, swarms of spiders suddenly appeared and attacked them.
Over the next few days two people – a man and a school boy – died after being bitten by the strange spiders. Hundreds more later turned up at the town’s hospital with spider bites.
District authorities are now panicked, and they’re considering spraying the town with the insecticide DDT.
Locals say the most terrifying aspect of the invasion is that the deadly spiders appear in swarms and their behavior is highly aggressive.
“It leaps at anything that comes close. Some of the victims claimed the spider latched on to them after biting. If that is so, it needs to be dealt with carefully. The chelicerae and fangs of this critter are quite powerful,” head of the department of life sciences at Dibrugarh University Dr. L.R. Saikia said.
Teams of Indian arachnid experts have traveled to the town with the hopes of identifying the species, but so far they have come up empty.
They say it could be a whole new species. It would appear that this particular spider is not native to the area as there is no record of venomous spiders in Assam.
More in the video below.
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