SPIDER-HEROES!

Spiders at work

I don’t know about you but there’s one thing about autumn that totally freaks me.

I love the blazing colours of the trees, leaves crackling underfoot, frosty mornings with spiderwebs draped like fine lace across the hedges… and that’s the thing. SPIDERS! Monster ones that race out of secret spidey-hidey-holes in my house and scare the life out of me. Like this one…

scream!

One autumn holiday in the French countryside, I woke to the sound of screaming. It was the most beautiful, misty morning and a vast army of French spiders had been busy all night long, covering the fields with endless cobwebs.

Then they’d moved into the house and my young daughter had woken up like Sleeping Beauty, inside curtains of spiderwebs…

But have you ever seen a spider tree? Climate change has wrecked the lives of millions of people across the world and when devastating floods hit Pakistan, even the spiders had to run for their lives – up into the trees, which they covered in dense webs until they looked like candyfloss.

Don’t be scared – click HERE for amazing photos of ‘candyfloss’ spider trees.

The spiderweb trees look magical. And those clever spiders cast a kind of magic spell. Great clouds of mosquitos had invaded the stagnant flooded lands but the spiders caught them in their webs and ate them – saving lots of adults, children and babies from catching malaria, a killer disease.

Nature is so clever – and humans often are too. When I wrote about young survivors on a flooded Earth in EXODUS, my climate-change trilogy, I imagined ingenious humans of the future would build stunning sky cities rising high above crocodile-infested floods and Greenland becoming a fertile new land after the ice melts…

But I NEVER imagined floodlands full of life-saving spider trees!

So the next time a monster spider comes scuttling towards you, don’t kill it. Scream away – but remember that spiders can be superheroes!