I had always thought that spiders could balloon, a process that carried them long distances with the help from the wind, but recently found out they can fly across entire oceans on long strands of silk. Scientists have discovered that when spiders are in a chamber with no wind, but a small electric field, they are likely to prep for take off. The sensory hairs that cover a spiders body move when the electric field is turned on, much like our hair stands on end due to static electricity. The spiders sense that it is time to fly.
This makes the spider only the second known arthropod after bees, to sense and use electric fields. How did this information come to be known? It started several years ago in Hawaii, where an astrophysicist named Peter Gorham became interested in observations made by Charles Darwin years ago. Darwin observed spiders ballooning en masse aboard a ship at sea. He wondered if the spiders were using electrostatics to take off. Gorham wondered this too, and so he turned to finding the answer.
Gorham published his findings, hoping to find other scientists that would work on this question. Others got interested, and we now know more about spider migration than we did before. Spider migration is important. As top insect predators, spiders play a major role in all ecosystems. Information you could probably live without, but I thought it was pretty interesting.
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