Scientists Discover Spiders Can Fly Thousands Of Miles Using Electricity And Silk Shot Out Of Their Butts
Well that’s all fucking terrifying and deeply unsettling. I knew there were plenty of types of spiders that could leap like prime Shawn Kemp, then Australia’s got their whole house of horrors with spiders going on down there, and even the most basic of spider already has the whole eight-legs, fuckton of eyes combo working for them, so the last thing I needed to learn is that they could fly thousands of miles by shooting silk out of their butts, riding electric currents to wherever they so desire.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a thousand times, if spiders ever learn to work together the rest of us are screwed. There are an estimated 2.8 million spiders for every human. I don’t care how many flamethrowers Musk builds, that’s not a war we’re winning any time soon if they ever get a strong leader on their side to get everyone on the same page. If Bill Belichick ever bites a spider, triggering some sort of reverse-Peter Parker situation, we’re done for out here.
But let’s not dwell too much on the great Arachnid-Human War of the future. How about science only now just proving what Charles Darwin knew the first second he saw flying spiders land on his ship out at sea. My first thought if spiders landed on my ship would not be, “Huh. Must be the electrical currents in the atmosphere.” No no. It would have been, “Burn the ship and make sure there are no survivors. We cannot, for the good of humanity, allow these spiders to procreate.” It would have been reactionary and incorrect, much like most of my thoughts, but it would have been comforting in the moment.
Per Motherboard:
On Halloween in 1832, the naturalist Charles Darwin was onboard the HMS Beagle. He marveled at spiders that had landed on the ship after floating across huge ocean distances. “I caught some of the Aeronaut spiders which must have come at least 60 miles,” he noted in his diary. “How inexplicable is the cause which induces these small insects, as it now appears in both hemispheres, to undertake their aerial excursions.”
Darwin thought that electricity might be involved when he noticed that spider silk stands seemed to repel each other with electrostatic force, but many scientists assumed that the arachnids, known as “ballooning” spiders, were simply sailing on the wind like a paraglider. The wind power explanation has thus far been unable to account for observations of spiders rapidly launching into the air, even when winds are low, however.
Worst Halloween ever. How you don’t chalk up FLYING SPIDERS AT SEA to witchcraft or some other mysticism at work is beyond my comprehension. But good for Darwin to add another notch to the belt 200 years after the fact.