{"id":2978,"date":"2025-01-09T06:44:32","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T06:44:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/?p=2978"},"modified":"2025-01-09T06:44:35","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T06:44:35","slug":"the-mysterious-art-of-spider-ballooning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/book-reviews-summary\/the-mysterious-art-of-spider-ballooning\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mysterious Art of Spider Ballooning"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Number of words: 561<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spiders have no wings, but they can take to the air nonetheless. They\u2019ll climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away. This behavior is called ballooning. It might carry spiders away from predators and competitors, or toward new lands with abundant resources. But whatever the reason for it, it\u2019s clearly an effective means of travel. Spiders have been found two-and-a-half miles up in the air, and 1,000 miles out to sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is commonly believed that ballooning works because the silk catches on the wind, dragging the spider with it. But that doesn\u2019t entirely make sense, especially since spiders only balloon during light winds. Spiders don\u2019t shoot silk from their abdomens, and it seems unlikely that such gentle breezes could be strong enough to yank the threads out \u2013 let alone to carry the largest species aloft, or to generate the high accelerations of arachnid takeoff. Darwin himself found<\/a> the rapidity of the spiders\u2019 flight to be \u201cquite unaccountable\u201d and its cause to be \u201cinexplicable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recent research has shown<\/a> that spiders can sense the Earth\u2019s electric field, and use it to launch themselves into the air. Every day, around 40,000 thunderstorms<\/a> crackle around the world, collectively turning Earth\u2019s atmosphere into a giant electrical circuit<\/a>. The upper reaches of the atmosphere have a positive charge, and the planet\u2019s surface has a negative one. Even on sunny days with cloudless skies, the air carries a voltage of around 100 volts for every meter above the ground. In foggy or stormy conditions, that gradient might increase to tens of thousands of volts per meter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ballooning spiders operate within this planetary electric field. When their silk leaves their bodies, it typically picks up a negative charge. This repels the similar negative charges on the surfaces on which the spiders sit, creating enough force to lift them into the air. And spiders can increase those forces by climbing onto twigs, leaves, or blades of grass. Plants, being earthed, have the same negative charge as the ground that they grow upon, but they protrude into the positively charged air. This creates substantial electric fields between the air around them and the tips of their leaves and branches\u2014and the spiders ballooning from those tips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Morley and Robert have tested this hypothesis with actual spiders. They put the arachnids on vertical strips of cardboard in the center of a plastic box, and then generated electric fields between the floor and ceiling of similar strengths to what the spiders would experience outdoors. These fields ruffled tiny sensory hairs on the spiders\u2019 feet<\/a>, known as trichobothria. In response, the spiders performed a set of movements called tiptoeing\u2014they stood on the ends of their legs and stuck their abdomens in the air. \u201cThat behavior is only ever seen before ballooning,\u201d says Morley. Many of the spiders actually managed to take off, despite being in closed boxes with no airflow within them. And when Morley turned off the electric fields inside the boxes, the ballooning spiders dropped. Air currents might still play some role in ballooning. After all, the same hairs that allow spiders to sense electric fields can also help them to gauge wind speed or direction. And Moonsung Cho<\/a> showed that spiders prepare for flight by raising their front legs into the wind<\/a>, presumably to test how strong it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Number of words: 561 Spiders have no wings, but they can take to the air nonetheless. They\u2019ll climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away. This behavior is called ballooning. It might carry spiders away from predators and competitors, or toward new lands with abundant … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Mysterious Art of Spider Ballooning - BullsEye<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/book-reviews-summary\/the-mysterious-art-of-spider-ballooning\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Mysterious Art of Spider Ballooning - BullsEye\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Number of words: 561 Spiders have no wings, but they can take to the air nonetheless. 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