What is making my backyard sparkle at night?

from how Stuff works dot com where smart Happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, what is making my backyard sparkle at night? This past weekend. I was cleaning my desk and I found my headlight lamp. This is one of those little led flashlights with a strap so that you can wear it on your forehead. You see them in Home Depot and Lows and Amazon in places like that. They cost about fifteen dollars. So you know how once you find or buy something like that, you

want to try it out. I'm the same way. So I strapped my headlight lamp on. I called the dog and we went out in the backyard to look around. I've been doing this big yard project, so there were some piles of dirt in the backyard. I turned on my light and I spun my head around and just looked around the backyard with it, and the strangest thing happened.

The backyard sparkled. The pile of dirt that was over to my left had all these reflections coming off of it, like it was covered in little diamonds or something like that. I stood and faced the pile and looked at it, and it was still sparkling. There were dozens of spots of brightly reflected light. What in the world could that be. I assumed it was mica or quartz crystals or something mixed in with the clay of the soil and the pile of dirt. So I walked up closer to investigate.

And everyone I investigated was a wolf spider. What I was seeing was the light being reflected off the eyes of wolf spiders. Yes, wolf spiders, thousands of them, thousands of thousands. You look around the backyard and they are absolutely everywhere, And if you think about it, there could actually be twice that many, because there could be an equal number of spiders facing the opposite direction. That's a

lot of spiders. So I want to make sure that I'm not hallucinating about this effect or the number of spiders. I grab Lee and I take her outside and I put the headlight on her head. What do you see? I asked her. I've not told her a thing. You've discovered diamonds, she asks, She is seeing the same reflections. You don't see it with a normal flashlight. I guess that the light has to be close to your eyes to get the right angle of reflection so that you

can actually see the spiders. I tell her to go and investigate one of the reflections. She is not particularly happy with me when she finds out what's at the other end. Then I show the kids one by one. They all see it too, and we went on a spider hunt together. They were far more excited than Lee was. Of course, this isn't a new discovery. As soon as you go to Google and plug the idea in, you can find lots of pages with titles like headlighting for spiders.

Apparently people have been seeing wolf spiders this way ever since we figured out how to strap lights onto our heads. You might want to try it one night. I live in North Carolina. If your location is anything like North Carolina, there may be thousands of spiders out right now staring at you. For more on this and thousands of other topics because that house stuff works dot com and don't forget to check out the brain Stuff blog on the

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