THE BIBLE speaks of a plague of locusts that once rained down on the Pharaoh of Egypt after he refused to let Moses and his people go.
But that’s got nothing on the shocking footage that has emerged on social media this week showcasing what appears to be, to all intents and purposes, a literal rain of spiders.
The footage was captured by a young boy in Espírito Santo do Dourado in Brazil who was left “stunned and scared” at the sight of arachnids raining down from the sky.
14-year-old João Pedro Martinelli Fonseca filmed the video at his grandparent’s farm in the rural southern region of Minas Gerais state.
In the clip, spiders can be seen clustered in the air, high above the onlookers below.
The scene is like something out of a horror film or the kind of epics that once graced the big screen courtesy of Cecil B. DeMile.
But while it may have at first appeared as if spiders were raining down from the sky, the truth was something slightly less Biblical.
Instead, the reality ended up being that while the spiders appeared to be falling on the people below, they were actually moving on top of a gigantic canopy-like web.
This is standard for spiders of this type in South America, where it's known as the 'rain of spiders'.
It's all down to the country's hot and humid climate, which often results in giant shared spiderwebs.
Speaking to The Sun, Cristina Anne Rheims, a biologist at the Butano Institute at UOL, was keen to stress the spiders posed no risk to the publice.
“They are harmless, they do not cause accidents and their venom is not dangerous for humans,” she said.
It’s not the first time things have got a little Biblical in the news.
A few months back a wildlife management company came across a two-headed snake.
