Two Texas holidaymakers came back from a Royal Caribbean cruise to a nasty surprise: their car, parked at Cruise Terminal 10 in Galveston, was crawling with hundreds of baby spiders. The men, Lubbock residents in their twenties, were so rattled they flagged down an Uber driver rather than get into their own vehicle — and headed straight to a Walmart for pesticide.
The story comes via Donnie Broussard, a rideshare driver of seven years who picked the pair up and shared photos and videos they showed him in a local Facebook group. He initially assumed they'd carried the spiders from home, until realising other cars in the same lot were affected too. Several passengers had reported finding spiders on their vehicles in the same parking area just a few weeks earlier, and locals chimed in with similar experiences — one woman described spiderlings pouring out of her car's air vents on the drive home from work.
There's a perfectly natural explanation, though. September is peak season for spiderlings, which disperse by a behaviour called ballooning: they release fine strands of silk that the wind catches, carrying them through the air until they land en masse on fences, buildings, trees — and parked cars. A single egg sac can hold 300 or more spiderlings depending on the species, and the yellow garden spider's sacs can produce up to 1,200. Pest controllers in South Texas note that spider activity ramps up from late summer into autumn, and that outdoor lights draw insects, which in turn draw spiders — a useful thing to know if you're leaving a car in a long-stay lot by the coast.
The Port of Galveston, which operates the parking around Terminal 10, has been contacted for comment. In the meantime, the practical takeaway for anyone cruising from Galveston in autumn is simple: give your car a once-over before you drive off, check vents and mirrors, and maybe skip parking under oak trees or bright lights. It's not a cruise line problem so much as a Gulf Coast autumn phenomenon — but it's worth knowing before you return to your vehicle with your suitcase and your guard down.
