Thousands of spiders build new spider webs after floodwaters forced them to move to higher grounds, Wagga Wagga on Tuesday, March 6, 2012.

Thousands of spiders are busily re-spinning their webs en masse around Wagga Wagga, an event experts call ‘ballooning’.

Flood events typically trigger mass ‘ballooning’ events.

“They often do it as a way of dispersing and getting into a new area but, in an event like this, they are just trying to escape the floods,” Graham Milledge, entomology collections manager at the Australian Museum in Sydney said. “They often land in the same place and that is why you get this large mass of them.”

In their quest to move to safer or better ground, spiders let out individual strings of silk that catch the wind, lifting them up into the air and away.

“The behaviour is called ballooning – that is how they disperse”, Graham Milledge, entomology collections manager at the Australian Museum in Sydney said.

The tiny spiders, which are up to one centimetre long, belong to the Linyphiidae family.

They are commonly referred to as sheet weavers because of the shape of their webs, or money spiders because of the superstition they bring good fortune if they land on you.

A resident observes thousands of spiders build new spider webs after floodwaters forced them to move to higher grounds, Wagga Wagga on Tuesday, March 6, 2012.

A rural property in Wagga Wagga is covered in spider webs, after the arachnids were forced to re-build their homes after the flooding, en masse.

Thousands of spiders build new spider webs after floodwaters forced them to move to higher grounds, Wagga Wagga on Tuesday, March 6, 2012. More than 9000 people have been evacuated from Wagga Wagga as flooding continues to ravage vast areas of NSW.