Spiders use electricity to fly

Although only 0.1% of spider species are dangerous to humans, most of them tend to dread them. Now a team of scientists from the University of Bristol (England) has discovered a fascinating quality of small arachnids.

And it is that the aerodynamic capabilities of spiders have intrigued scientists for hundreds of years. Charles Darwin himself pondered how hundreds of creatures managed to perch on the Beagle on a calm day at sea, then took off from the ship at high speed on a windless day.

"The Darwin sighting, however, has not provided more evidence of support," comments the authors.

Scientists have attributed this flight behavior of these wingless arthropods to a "balloon flight," where spiders can be transported thousands of miles, releasing traces of silk that propels them in the wind. However, when there is no wind, cloudy days or even rain, how do spiders take off when they have such a low level of aerodynamic drag?

The researchers found that spiders are browsers experts in the air electricity, indicates very interesting.

The electric fields that they detect through a few hairs in their legs, provide them with an elevation: they lift the abdomen, "they tiptoe" and release a silk thread for themselves. let go by the atmospheric electricity, even without the more "When we think of organisms transported in the air, spiders do not usually come to mind," say researchers Erica Morley and Daniel Robert from the University of Bristol, in the study published in the journal Current Biology. . "However, these wingless arthropods have been found 4 kilometers in the sky, scattering for hundreds of kilometers."

They travel through the gradient of atmospheric potential, an electrical circuit between the Earth and the ionosphere, the part of the upper atmosphere of the Earth is ionized by solar radiation

Electric storms act as a Giant battery for this atmospheric potential gradient, charging and maintaining electric fields in the atmosphere.

In 2013, a different group of researchers presented a theory that electric fields could be at least a part of the spider's expansion strategy, and Morley and Roberts were interested in seeing if spiders really reacted to electric fields and their fluctuations

of the genus Erigone (present in America, Eurasia, Africa and Oceania), some spiders of very small size and arranged for Several controlled experiments.

In one of them, they created a slight breeze; in another they eliminated it, but they added an electric potential similar to that which exists in the atmosphere.

In this way, by turning on and off the artificial electric field, they discovered that the spiders swelled when the field was lit, and that the electrostatic forces of the field were sufficient to stimulate their motion; This is the same force that lifts your hair if you rub a ball on your head. When the researchers turned off the electric field, the spiders came down.

Insects can detect both the atmospheric potential gradient and the electric fields surrounding the material.

This is due to sensory hairs (tricobothria) that move in response to the electric field, which researchers believe to be what spiders use to detect the atmospheric potential gradient.

Although science has taught us a lot, this type of study shows how much remains to be learned about the tricks that spiders have with their tiny eight legs.