Two Texas men 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 Lubbock residents, believed to be in their 20s, spotted the spiderlings swarming over the vehicle shortly after disembarking — and headed straight to a nearby Walmart for pesticide, according to Donnie Broussard, the Uber driver who gave them a lift.
Broussard, a seven-year rideshare veteran who knows the terminal parking areas well, said the men showed him photos and videos of the invaders. He initially wondered if they'd carried the spiders aboard from home, but that theory fell apart when it emerged other passengers had reported finding spiders on their cars in the same lot a few weeks earlier.
Locals in a Galveston Facebook group weren't exactly shocked. One resident said it happens in her car regularly, blaming the oak tree she parks under. Another described spiderlings pouring out of her car's air vents during her commute — she resorted to spraying them with hand sanitizer before a friend brought over proper insecticide.
There's a straightforward explanation, according to commenters and pest control experts. September is peak season for spiderlings, which disperse by a technique called ballooning: they release fine silk threads that the wind catches, carrying them — sometimes in large numbers — onto fences, buildings, vegetation and parked cars. A single egg sac can hold 300 or more spiderlings depending on the species, and the yellow garden spider can produce up to 1,200. South Texas pest control firm Pearsall's S&S Pest Control notes that from late summer into fall, spider activity ramps up noticeably, since outdoor lights draw insects and insects draw spiders.
The Port of Galveston, which runs the parking lots around Cruise Terminal 10, was contacted by The Independent for comment.
For anyone cruising out of Galveston — one of the busiest homeports in the US, serving Royal Caribbean, Carnival and Disney ships — this is a minor but genuinely useful heads-up. If you're collecting your car between late summer and mid-autumn, a quick walk around the vehicle before you load the luggage is a smart move. Check the vents, wheel arches and door seals, and keep a can of insecticide in the boot if you're road-tripping home like the Lubbock pair. It's a two-minute check that could spare you a very uncomfortable drive back to West Texas.
The story is a good reminder that port parking lots are, essentially, big open-air fields — prime landing zones for ballooning spiderlings in September. Cruise lines don't control the lots, so this falls into the small-print realities of self-parking at the terminal rather than anything the cruise line did wrong. Rideshare or shuttle options exist if you'd rather skip the lot altogether.
