This city in Greece is draped with thousands of spider webs

AITOLIKO, Greece – It looks like a horror movie: a city covered with thousands of canvases, each crawling with hordes of spiders.

But for the inhabitants of a city in Greece, it's a scary reality.

In recent days, the canvases have draped plants, trees and boats along the lagoon of Aitoliko, a canal town known as "Little Venice" in Greece.

Giannis Giannakopoulos noticed the "veil of the canvases" earlier this week and captured the creations of the spiders with his camera.

"It is natural that this area has insects, nobody is particularly worried," he told CNN. "But I've never seen so many spider webs in my life."

The phenomenon is rare, although networks have already appeared in other parts of the country.

According to the arachnologist Maria Chatzaki, they are still of the same type of spider: the genus Tetragnatha, a tiny creature less than 2 centimeters, or 0.7 inch.

Chatzaki told CNN that the canvases often turn into leaf-like blankets that house thousands of spiders living underneath.

Greek biologist Fotis Pergantis, president of the Messolonghi Lagoon National Park, explained that there is a simple explanation.

According to Pergantis, the favorite snacks of spiders are behind this phenomenon: midges.

Small mosquito-like insects with a life span of two to three days, midges use most of their lives to reproduce. They thrive in hot, humid weather and continue to breed during this time.

And since temperatures in Aitoliko recently were ideal for midges, Pergantis said that there was a lot of breeding going on.

"When these temperatures last long enough, we can see a second, third and fourth generation of gnats and end up with a large population," he said.

With the growth of the midges population, spiders are growing and multiplying.

"It's the simple prey-predator phenomenon," said Pergantis. "These are the natural responses of the ecosystem and once temperatures begin to drop and gnat populations disappear, spider populations will also decrease."

Neither midges nor spiders are dangerous to humans. But the inhabitants of Aitoliko will have to do a lot of dusting.