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this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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Maybe they've known about them but haven't been able to capture them until now
They've observed this in a lab.
Is this study (afaik published in 2018, but the paper is different to the 2021 one?) distinct from the others? I'm guessing they detailed the "electric" part better?
Edit:
Ohhh, it was about electric fields specifically. The 2018 paper only had airflow, they ar added/experimented with electric fields in the next study (it wasn't new, just nobody tested it):
However, a recent experiment showed that exposure to an electric field alone can induce spiders’ pre-ballooning behaviours (tiptoe and dropping/dangling) and even pulls them upwards in the air. The controversy between explanations of ballooning by aerodynamic flow or the earth’s electric field has long existed.
More from wiki/Ballooning_(spider):
It is observed in many species of spiders, such as Erigone atra, Cyclosa turbinata, as well as in spider mites (Tetranychidae) and in 31 species of lepidoptera, distributed in 8 suborders. Bell and his colleagues put forward the hypothesis that ballooning first appeared in the Cretaceous. A 5-year-long research study in the 1920s–1930s revealed that 1 in every 17 invertebrates caught mid-air is a spider. Out of 28,739 specimens, 1,401 turned out to be spiders.
Although this phenomenon has been known since the time of Aristotle, the first precise observations were published by the arachnologist John Blackwall in 1827. Several studies have since made it possible to analyze this behavior. One of the most important and extensive studies exploring ballooning was funded by U.S. Department of Agriculture and performed between 1926 and 1931 by a group of scientists. The findings were published in 1939 in a 155-page bulletin compiled by P. A. Glick.
It seems more researchers were electrifying spiders (links to older studies):
A 2018 study concluded that electric fields provide enough force to lift spiders in the air, and possibly elicit ballooning behavior.[1], [2]
The Earth's static electric field may also provide lift in windless conditions.[9], [10] Ballooning behavior may be triggered by favorable electric fields.[11], [12]
Wiki also has a pic from Cho's paper (2018):
TIL:
Some mites and some caterpillars also use silk to disperse through the air.
... also I'm 100% sure the spiders let out a tiny 'wiiiiii' when they get airborne ...
But how common are windless conditions, really? It seems incredibly rare that there would be so little air movement that the effect of it wouldn't far overwhelm the electrostatic effect. I'm no meteorologist, though.
Pictured is a banana spider, shitloads of them around here. Those are not flying. Looks like this one is making the zig-zag thing some orb weavers make.
Cool fact! They're also called Golden Orb Weavers because their webs shine gold when the sun hits right.
Bananaspider is quite ambiguous and refers to multiple spiders.
Golden Orb Weaver is the common name for Nephila (which this one is not), though often wrongly applied to Argiope.
This one is Argiope cf. aurantia, which has a bunch of common names including "golden garden spider", but I prefer "black and yellow garden spider".
because their webs shine gold when the sun hits right.
That is Nephila, not Argiope. Argiope are the ones with the zig-zag pattern, though.
Crane flies are a big deal where I live, and especially the ones with reeeeally long legs - longer than anything pictured in the Wikipedia article - just love to come into people's homes, especially in September.
EDIT: Why is this relevant? When I was a little tyke, I'd constantly mistake them for airborne spiders. Sometimes, they form frigging swarms anywhere where there's water.
Hasn’t this been known for some time? Perhaps I’m confusing these spiders with ones that simply form wind sails.
Didn't the baby spiders fly away at the end of Charlottes Web?
Yeah, it was chaos on the set just off-camera.
The most recent article in the post is about 4 years old. I definitely recall learning this a while ago.
If you read any of the article OP provided, you'll see that the common belief that they were simply using the wind was false and they actually use electric currents in the air.
Adrian Tchaikovsky warned us of this.
Actually those spiders were pretty damn cool! And it's an excellent book series.
Oh, for sure. I hate spiders, and I was loathe to read it, but damned if I didn't enjoy all of them.
For a Sci-Fi newbie who's thinking of trying out Tchaikovsky, any advice on where to start?
Start off with the Children of Time series, there's no reason not to. Well written, great story with memorable characters, and a fantastic hard sci-fi twist on what intelligent life really is, and how we think of ourselves and others.
Thanks! I'll go for that as soon as I'm finished with the Three Body Problem series.
Third part is very disorienting however — it took me almost till the end to understand what was going on.
Well. Fuck.
This is how our lizard overlords felt when humans first achieved flight
Found the crab person
I didn't know that spiders could get any cooler
How do the electric fields holds up the scientists?
Uhhh, magnets, I assume. I've gone through the physics courses, scrapped through intro to electrical engineering, and I still don't get magnets. So we'll just go with those.
They were bitten by an ~~radioactive~~ electromagnetic spider!
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.
Im imagining Eureka Seven but with spiders riding surfboards instead of mech its spider.
Arachnophobia Seven
I recently heard a lecture that claimed that "halos” or "auras" some people see are humans' magnetic fields. I'd like to see some research on it.
You would probably find kirlian photography an interesting read.
Next they figure out that Dandelion chutes actually use charge differences to fly or something.
This spider is clearly on a mission, it has an objective and won't let anything get in the way of it.
flying nope