Spiders use electricity to fly without Miles

Look, spiders are great. They are an important part of the ecosystem and benefit humans by eating insects, including mosquitoes and agricultural pests. That said, many people are afraid of spiders, even those that pose no risk to humans.

To these people, please do not read further. Because scientists have discovered more about a process that allows some spiders to "fly" without the help of wings. According to a study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, spiders use natural electric fields to help them travel up to hundreds of kilometers.

The phenomenon of spiders that seem to float over long distances is not new. Scientists have long observed spiders "bloating", which means pulling silk strands and floating in the air. But they discussed exactly how it works.

"In the early 1800s there were arguments that spiders used electric fields to inflate, but there were also people who claimed that it was windy", said Erica Morley, lead author of the new study. "And the wind argument probably convinced him because it is more obvious."

But Morley's work suggests that electricity plays an important role after all. She and Daniel Robert, both researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK, placed the Linyphiid spiders in an "arena" with an electric field that mimicked the natural world.

Basically, thunderstorms create a constant electrical circuit between the earth's surface and the upper atmosphere, according to a press release on the study. The electricity can be stronger, depending on the weather conditions.

As the Atlantic explains, the surface of the Earth has a negative charge while the upper atmosphere has a positive charge. Since spider silk, when it is released, takes a negative charge, some scientists have theorized that it might help them to take off, as the negative charge of the silk repels the negative charge on the surface. The effect would be all the more powerful as the spiders would be higher up in the air.

Morley and Roberts discovered that spiders seem to be able to detect electric fields. When they turned on the electric field inside the arena, more spiders started heading to a high point, standing on their legs and sending silk to start the process of ball. Some spiders have managed to take off even without wind inside the arena.

The new study does not mean that the wind plays no role in the long-range air travel of spiders, but it shows that they can

Morley told HuffPost in an email that although his discoveries should apply to many different species of spiders, all do not indulge in hot air ballooning

"Many species of spider balloons, but not all," A-t- she says, noting that some are just too big to travel that way. </ p> <p> In other words, there's no need to worry, say, about an arachnid the size of a tarantula rising to you from the sky.

"Many juvenile spiders will fly away before being too big," she says. "Some adult spiders do bubbles, but they are not at all the size of a cultured tarantula. "