Spiders don’t have wings, but they can fly across entire oceans on long strands of silk. For more than a century, scientists thought it was the wind that carried them, sometimes as high as a jet stream — in a process known as “ballooning.” A new study shows that the Earth’s electric field can propel these flying spiders too.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, found that when spiders are in a chamber with no wind, but a small electric field, they are likely to prep for take-off, or even fly. Plus, the sensory hairs covering the spiders’ bodies move when the electric field is turned on — much like your own hair stands up due to static electricity. This “spidey sense” could be how the creatures know it’s time to fly.
This makes spiders only the second known arthropod species, after bees, to sense and use electric fields. Because humans don’t feel Earth’s electric field, its role in biology is often overlooked, said Erica Morley, the study’s lead author.
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This makes spiders only the second known arthropod species, after bees, to sense and use electric fields.
But birds use the magnetic field to navigate, correct?
Because humans don’t feel Earth’s electric field, its role in biology is often overlooked.
Speaking of the magnetic field, there is purportedly an Aboriginal group in Australia that uses a subjective form of orientation terminology baked into their language or syntax, that forces their speakers to maintain an intricate and complex awareness of their surroundings and place in them.
Anyway… these people seem to be able to sense fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field, for example - they can tell when a solar storm is hitting the atmosphere.
So what I am leaning from this headline is the zombie spiders in Ireland can fly across oceans and get to me.
Great. Thanks Trump!
Worse it means technically the spiders in Australia are necessarily trapped there. Also the fact that spiders can fly is nightmares fuel.
Also the fact that spiders can fly is nightmares fuel.
In your mouth several times a year.
I don’t know if it’s better or worse that they don’t have wings to fly indoors like some removedroaches
Up there with swimming snakes and flying squirrels
Honestly, at this point, what an incredible end that would be. So much cooler than what’s likely coming.
The real reason the Titanic sank is they sailed through a Spidercloud, and the captain freaked out and swerved into it.
What the fuck do they think is happening? “Wow, sure has been a long time since I started hurdling through fucking space”
Sounds like some shit you’d see in Morrowind
its nice to know spiders are crossing the oceans to get me.
Ride The Lightning
How did they test this? How did the know that Chuck left Japan and ended up in Oregon?
Just put an airtag on it!
Do you know that feeling when you walk outside and suddenly have a random spiderweb-strain in your face? You need to wipe it out of your face with a hand. Maybe this was my spidery flying friend using electric fields to fly past my face.
how can they survive?
Most spiders can go a long time without eating, and most are too small to be killed from falling to the ground
hm … how far of a fall can ants survive? Is it because of their low body-mass compared to their surface area?
That’s part of it yes. Also gravity is proportional to mass, so smaller things will experience less force due to gravity. Everything will still fall with the same acceleration (9.8 m/s^2 on earth) ((ignoring air resistance)), but the impact from hitting the ground will be a lot easier to handle for small creatures. For example, an ant can survive a fall from pretty much any height, while an elephant can’t even fall a few feet without getting hurt.
Fun fact: Once you get to a small enough scale, it’s safe to just ignore gravity altogether, since it’s so much weaker than other forces like electromagnetism.
F = m*g… you are right the Force a mass experiences in a gravitational Field is proportional to its mass. And this equation reminds me of the force exerted on a charged particle in an electric field:
F = q*EThe force a charged particle with charge q experiences in an electric field is proportional to its charge.
If they aren’t doing anything, they dont need any energy.
Also, probably not all of them do.
