Two men reportedly returned from a Royal Caribbean cruise to find hundreds of baby spiders covering their car in a Texas parking lot.
The Lubbock residents, believed to be in their 20s, had just returned to Galveston when they spotted the spiderlings crawling over their vehicle at Royal Caribbean’s Cruise Terminal 10, according to Uber driver Donnie Broussard, who picked them up.
The men were “freaked out” by the “little spiders everywhere,” Broussard told the Chron Monday. In a Facebook post in a local community group, Broussard said that they had shown him photos and videos of the creepy crawlers.
“I thought they might have brought [the spiders] from where they came from, but that wouldn’t explain the other cars,” Broussard told the Chron.
Several other passengers had reported finding spiders on their vehicles in the same parking area a few weeks earlier, Broussard said.
Broussard, who has worked as a rideshare driver for seven years, said he knows the parking areas around the cruise terminal well.
“Now, I had never heard of this before, it shocked me a little...” he wrote in the “Galveston Talk” Facebook group.
After the men discovered the spiders, Broussard said he drove them to a nearby Walmart to buy pesticide. “Has anyone heard of this happening?” he asked the group.
It turns out this is far from an isolated incident.
“Have them sometimes in my car! I thought it was because I park under an oak tree,” another community group poster, Terri Doerrzapf, wrote.
“I had this happen to me on my way home from work. It was horrible. I hadn’t seen them until my son noticed them. Next thing I know they were coming out of all the vents. I was using some spray hand sanitizer to kill them until I finally got home and a family friend came over with some special spray that killed them all,” local Katrina Cantu wrote.
One user, Tom N Lahna Wells, provided a possible explanation. “September is a prime time for spiderlings,” their post noted.
“Spiderlings commonly disperse by releasing very fine strands of silk. Wind catches the silk and carries them away — the behavior commonly called ballooning. They can land en masse on fences, buildings, vegetation and even cars. Depending on the kind of spider one egg sack could contain 300+ spiderlings, the yellow garden spider could even be up to 1,200 spiderlings.”
According to Pearsall's S&S Pest Control in South Texas, from late summer into fall, spider activity often becomes more noticeable around homes and businesses. “Outdoor lights attract insects, and those insects attract spiders,” the website states.
The Independent has contacted the Port of Galveston, which operates the parking lots around Cruise Terminal 10, for comment.
