I know the state of world politics is bad, but that headline does not in fact signal that things have finally progressed to a sci-fi level of alarm involving marching armies of super-arachnids. No. In fact these gorgeous/creepy images of the thousands of spiders who crawled into the trees to avoid the flooding in Pakistan have a happy-ish side note: most of the Malaria-carrying mosquitos in the region got bamboozled in the webs. TIME photographer Russell Watkins photographed the scene, and was quoted as saying: "No one had ever witnessed anything like this before."

• Russell Watkins for TIME