Joro spiders likely to spread beyond Georgia
news.uga.edu
news.uga.edu
Almost 4(edit) years later, when you go outside on a misty morning during the summer, you look up into the trees as you drive home and it is literally nothing but glimmering Joro spider webs. Thousands of them.
Most of them now appear in my back yard as I removed those trees, but it was crazy to see peoples faces when they walked to my front door and realized what they were walking past and freaked out at a 3 inch spider about 5 foot away from them.
edit: when I looked up the UGA professor name I realized I emailed it back in September 2018! Crazy.
It had to be around that time, because I moved shortly thereafter.
Anecdotal, but when I saw this headline I immediately thought back upon it.
Here's one from 2006 in Central Florida: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bobisbob/299200141/in/datepost...
Thanks for clarifying.
entomology from the greek ἔντομον for "insect", the tom actually is the same tom in atom.
- "The Greek word entomon, meaning “notched,” refers to the segmented body plan of the insect."
https://www.britannica.com/science/entomology
- "Etymology : From ἐν- (en-, “in”) + τόμος (tómos, “slice”)."
Edit: There's a pretty good example picture of the webs in the UGA article mentioned by the main article: https://news.uga.edu/joro-spiders-likely-to-spread-beyond-ge...
I know now from the article that they're harmless, but as a mild arachnophobe the experience was highly unpleasant.
Awesome experience, but a few people harmed during the summer, mostly because of the tools (and one by bees, one by green caterpillars, one by dehydration after going to work by 40°C after a night drinking - so basically all their faults as long as you value yourself). Said boss had prison experience. I tend to believe Gen Y misses the year of military service and tend to replace it with similar experiences, and the gap year in Australia is toughening for the office monkey and the nerds we were. 100% would do it again.
"The study found that despite their similarities, the Joro spider has about double the metabolism of its relative, has a 77% higher heart rate and can survive a brief freeze that kills off many of its cousins. These findings mean the Joro spider’s body functions better than its relative in a cold environment.
And that means the Joros can likely exist beyond the borders of the Southeast."
My least favorite Florida spider is also nonvenomous but I used to get bitten by the spiny orb weaver any time I was near a citrus tree.
The worst part was the pain would last a few hours.
Globalism: it's for spiders, too.
"Joro spiders also appear to be able to capture and feed on at least one insect that other local spiders are not: adult brown marmorated stink bugs, an invasive pest that can infest houses and damage crops."
I remember visiting the Lake Michigan dunes in Indiana in the 70s, only to encounter what appeared to the small me to be mountains of dead alewife. Ten years later, my grandfather took me salmon fishing there. I'd imagine that by now, the ecosystems of the Great Lakes bear little resemblance to what they contained 200 years ago. Sad in a way, but the whole of Earth seems destined to becoming a single, climate-based ecosystem. Island ecologies may survive for a few centuries, but the main continents are going to become very consistent, with all the world-champion species holding sway.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=878434...
> In June 1935, 102 cane toads were imported to Gordonvale from Hawaii
> Since their release, toads have rapidly multiplied in population and now number over 200 million (...) but also no evidence indicates that they have affected the cane beetles for which they were introduced to prey upon.
[0] https://news.uga.edu/joro-spiders-likely-to-spread-beyond-ge...
Seems like an odd choice to compare a spider and the Bubonic plague. Wouldn't any number of invasive species have been better?
So I think the plague reference was meant as another way to exaggerate the severity of the situation for humorous effect. That was my take anyway.
A spider the size of the palm of your hand sounds pretty terrifying to me no matter how harmless it is, but then I really don't like spiders of any size.
I'm booking a one way trip to the North Pole or wherever these flying spiders aren't.
Looks like we're both signing up for the first one-way trip to Mars.
Until one crawls across the windshield of your car whilst driving.
I'm glad I was the driver when it happened. I can still remember the screams of my then co-pilot, however. She definitely had arachnophobia.
By far the most successful invasive arthropod in the Nearctic is the European honeybee, but you never really hear anyone talk about the considerable ecological harm those do, for the obvious reason that their agricultural and thus economic utility is considered far to outweigh the externalities of their cultivation.
A shame, if you ask me. Social wasps are already quite smart despite having only a few hundred thousand neurons apiece to work with; I think I'd quite like to live in a world where the largest hornets were perhaps dog-sized, with brains to match, or indeed much larger still. If nothing else, maybe people wouldn't so often look at me funny for how well I get on with wasps and spiders, as if there were some absurd betrayal of essential humanity in the simple act of not being frightened by animals compared to even the largest of which we may as well be so many walking mountains.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9zxNLU-ei0
(the spider lost this round, apparently)
In any case, they're a lot more scared of us, and fairly so - imagine Cthulhu peering into your bedroom window, and you've got a fair picture of what it's like to be a spider who's suffered the mishap of somehow attracting human attention.
Maybe if we took the time to get a little less bad at that, we'd get a little better at keeping healthy the ecosystems on which we also depend for survival. It's nice to think so, anyway, not that it matters; apparently it's much more important to us to go on thinking we're somehow special, privileged to dispose of all life on this planet and the planet entire as if we need never fear the slightest consequence. Hasn't this kind of foolishness already got us in enough trouble? Don't you think it'd be a good idea if we didn't keep it up and buy ourselves even more?
That's enough internet for me tonight.
Everybody draws their own lines, is all, and this is one of mine.
Not sure it's a species thing though. I wouldn't jump to murder but I might swat at an uninvited person I found spinning silk behind my washing machine.
Even if they did promise to eat bugs.
So the best way to bring them outside is to put a plastic cup over the spider, then carefully slide a postcard underneath the cup, and then release it outside.
It depends on the spider, too. Orb weavers are reliably fearful, which makes sense given how little they can perceive away from a web, but I've had the occasional salticid climb up to perch on my knuckles with no sign of dismay, and wait to hop off until I bring my hand close to a suitable surface.
This is not comforting.
"* They are bright yellow, black, blue, and red and can grow up to 3 inches.
* They likely traveled across the globe on shipping containers, similar to the Bubonic plague.
* Their life cycle begins in early spring, but they get big in June and are often seen in July and August.
* They're named for Jorōgumo, a creature of Japanese folklore that can shapeshift into a woman or spider before killing its prey."
Emphasis added.
You don't need to worry about giant spiders with four-inch legspans falling on your head! Or not more than usually, at least - the spiders drifting out of the sky will be only at most perhaps the size of a matchhead, and even more harmless than they would be when full-sized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)#:~:text=Portia....
The thought of just going slightly off the path and basically being covered by them made me shudder.
I don't usually kill spiders or take down their webs, but I kill these guys and remove their webs whenever they build near my house. It's futile, but I do it anyway.
This article seem to say they're harmless. But I have heard reports of them harming local hummingbird population and driving local spiders out.
My neighborhood also has a spider problem, and I always wonder how futile this sort of thing is? Can you ever make a significant difference when exterminating individual pest insects?
Similar question: how many gnats are flying around the food? Is it 3, or 30?
A) has arachnophobia and a general fear of insects, and
B) lives completely alone and can't get someone else to deal with stuff like this for me,
would someone who lives in Georgia be willing to confirm to me whether or not they come into houses, and how serious of a game plan I need to make for dealing with them?
I deal with house centipedes/crickets[0] with Raid and then scooping up the body after they're dead. Setting up bug barriers, keeping things clean, and keeping down any other insect populations that they'd feed on seems to deal with most everything else. Tiny bugs like boxelder bugs show up rarely, and are small enough that I can squish them without much trouble, but anything bigger than an inch is tough to deal with.
So if I'm likely to find one of these on my wall in my living room (even just occasionally), I legitimately need to plan ahead and figure out a one-person strategy for killing/moving them out of my house in a way that it isn't traumatizing, and if conventional bug barriers don't work to keep them out then I need to figure out something else for reducing the likelihood of them coming in the house.
If they're just outside, that's not so much of a problem, big bugs are fine outside, although it'll likely put a bit of a damper on my willingness to go hiking in wood trails given people's descriptions of the webs.
----
[0]: Yes, I know house centipedes are positive predators to have around and shouldn't be treated as pests, but I need to be able to walk into my bathroom without worrying I'll find one on the wall.
I have a vacuum with a detachable wand, but I've never really used it for insects because I always felt like... now what? Can't they just crawl back out?
Also slightly skeptical of a handheld grabber or my vacuum's ability to handle a 3 inch spider, but maybe I'm overestimating their grabbing strength. I guess I could also upgrade.
We have picked up wolf spiders of that size with it. The spider reflexively plays dead and gets small but runs off on release.
It's not even necessarily a complete avoidance thing -- seeing a large insect when I'm outside just feels different; it's something I'm more prepped for, I'm in a different mental state. Huge boon if I'll mostly only need to worry about them when biking/walking.
I've only had an orb weaver in the house a couple of times, and once ushered back out they typically remain so. One of them, a young red orb weaver, abseiled down from the ceiling onto my bare shoulder - I'm not sure which of us was more surprised, but even if I didn't like spiders quite well in general, I think her evident terror upon realizing her mistake would have aroused some degree of sympathy.
Most spiders you'll encounter indoors in the eastern US will be cobweb spiders, of which family black widows are by far the most famous - but also very rare, with more typically encountered cobweb spiders being quite harmless to humans. (Of course, so are widows, when given proper respect, as with the one who overwintered behind the toilet tank one year when I was ten or so. She kept to herself and so did we, and we all got along fine - and they are such beautiful creatures!) Beyond that you can expect the occasional wolf spider, salticid, or the like, these being cursorial hunters and thus not so much homebodies as spiders generally tend to be.
We had orb weavers all over our porch growing up, slightly terrifying to enter/leave the house if you're scared of them, you had to kind of walk through this tunnel of webs to get in and out. But I think a lot of their presence was environmental factors, being in a rural area right next to a river. If these follow the same rules, I'm relieved, I already mostly know how to manage orb weavers and how to avoid them.
> I think her evident terror upon realizing her mistake would have aroused some degree of sympathy.
Important to keep in mind that arachnophobia isn't really a rational thing; I can appreciate both the beauty and usefulness of some insects/spiders, and even have contexts where seeing them doesn't frighten me. If you're going to manage insect populations in a dwelling place you kind of have to be able to think about them as being part of an ecosystem, you don't really have a choice.
But appreciating spiders or even admiring them doesn't change anything about fear of encountering them in certain situations. You can't logic your way out of an irrational fear, you just learn to manage it or you train yourself to deal with it or overcome it to at least some degree (depending on how far you're willing to go to change your instincts or avoid triggers). Telling yourself that they're not evil, or that they're harmless, or that they're more scared of you -- that stuff only really helps if those are the reasons you're afraid. But for most people, I think their reactions aren't really conscious or voluntary.
Another example is creatures like rodents. I keep pet rats, some of my relatives are pretty scared to be around them. It's not based on anything rational, they know the rats are harmless and cuddly and smart. It's just that they see the tail/hands and it freaks them out to be around them or to think about them. I'm not affected by that, I don't really understand the feeling because I don't feel any aversion to holding them or having them crawl around on me, my brain just registers them as cute. I never had to overcome anything to be able to hold them, my brain had the opposite reaction and immediately wanted to hold them as soon as I saw them. My family and I have the same information and understanding about rats, but for some of my family members there's a subconscious, emotional aversion that they have to overcome even to be in the same room, and for me there's just not.
I'm a little envious of people who don't have an innate fear of insects or instinctual fears around them. I've worked reasonably hard to get it to a manageable level where I can live alone comfortably and where I'm mostly not worried about insects most of the time, and it doesn't disrupt my life -- but that was difficult to do, it was a lot of work; definitely not quite as simple as just learning more about them.
> appreciating them or even admiring them doesn't change anything about fear of encountering them in certain situations
because I used to be afraid of wasps and spiders, and what changed that was precisely the experience of being in close quarters with them and having opportunity to observe reactions ranging from total disinterest to mortal fear. Then I started chasing them around with a camera, in order to take macro shots from six inches away, and discovered that even in those circumstances they really couldn't care less about any human not actively antagonizing them - that the occasions of their lives mean as much to them as those of ours to us. There's a basis for empathy in that, strange as it may seem to say in respect of creatures so superficially different from us.
I suppose this is what they call "exposure therapy", when it's done deliberately rather than by happenstance. But whatever we call it, I just couldn't stay scared of these tiny animals that so determinedly and reliably did absolutely nothing to suggest they had any interest in even trying to do me what trivial and evanescent harm they possibly could. After that, it was no great stretch to notice how beautiful and intelligent they actually are.
On reflection, if anything it's odd that I ever did become afraid of wasps and spiders. After all, one of my earliest memories is that of sitting on the tailgate of my mom's truck, watching with quiet but avid interest as a mud dauber picked daintily along the slice of pizza I was holding. I also wasn't kidding when I talked elsewhere in this thread about the black widow who set up shop behind our toilet tank a few years later - that literally happened, and while perhaps I might've done my daily business elsewhere had another bathroom been available, there wasn't and it took me no real time to become entirely accustomed to the circumstance. I don't know what changed to induce in adulthood a fear that in childhood I cannot ever recall experiencing, but that's all the more reason for me to think this kind of fear must be amenable to revision.
I understand not everyone who experiences such fear will choose to try to revise it, but my experience makes it impossible for me to conclude other than that this is, however implicit, a choice. Losing that fear has certainly made me a happier person, both for its own sake and in that it's made me more able to appreciate beauty than I was before. But perhaps I've not sufficiently considered the good fortune I had in stumbling by happenstance into circumstances that made it possible for me to understand - made it impossible not to understand - how absurd that fear really was. Absent that, I don't know if I'd ever even have thought to try.
That's not to say that a phobia can't be changed; exposure therapy/desensitization/etc are all real things (both formal and informal, and both deliberate and accidental), and my arachnophobia today is not as bad as it used to be growing up. But that improvement didn't come from an intellectual process, it came from a bunch of regular hard work, practice, small exposures, and small victories to try and rewire instinctive responses in my brain, and it was (and continues to be) a very long process. If I could just stop being afraid of spiders by reading a science book or just deciding to think about them differently, then I would have already done that when I was 12 -- but fear response to a phobia isn't a conscious decision, it's an involuntary response to a stimulus, and that involuntary response for some people can be completely disconnected from their conscious thoughts about what is happening. For example, thalassophobia doesn't mean that someone hates the ocean or that they can't think it's beautiful/majestic; it just means they have a fear response when exposed to deep water.
Pet chickens will also clean any surface of arthropods and remove the offenders. You'll need a chicken diaper, of course.
Yeah, I guess that counts as a "terrifying thing" if you consider those the two things on earth that travel across the globe on shipping containers.
https://twitter.com/givemefoxes/status/1501615636664958976
edit to add: What I did notice is that the insect population seems to be returning after years of decline. I see more bugs around lights every year. These could be the wolves of creepy crawlies.
Anyway we don't "burn them with fire" or "have heart attacks", we just leave them alone. This strategy has worked out well with humans and spiders co-existing in relative peace.
Looks like they'd make for some cool photos.
Nope, not a season I will formally acknowledge.
I'll take second and third winter, please.
> hatchlings are often spotted "flying" through the air on silk strands, a la the babies in Charlotte's Web
Like a human who flies using a balloon, the spider does not have any control over the flight direction. That depends on the winds.
However, the spider can control when to descend back to the ground, by gathering the silk string, like the human with the balloon, who can release the gas which fills the balloon.
Those who fly using silk strings are very young and small.
I blame an Allied moving van giving them a ride of ours from NC to CA.
For those unfamiliar with wolf spiders, on my size-of-paper-I-would-pick-one-up-with scale of spider scariness, wolf spiders rank somewhere between "playing card" and "business card." (For reference, Joros are somewhere around "birthday card.") That Wikipedia picture weighs in at an impressive "flattened cereal box (family size)"
I thought the whole "small fang" thing was a myth? Haven't we all heard of a local spider which is very poisonous but has fangs that are too small?
Does anyone know if the "small fang" thing is true? And does the spider have venom if it is able to bite?
Virtually all spiders are venomous, but many can't penetrate human skin and many have venom that isn't dangerous to humans at the dosage injected.
> Of around 50,000 spider species known, only about 25 (1/20 of 1%) have venom capable of causing illness in humans
From: https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology...
Some of them would furiously try to bite the stick and I could feel their fangs scraping on it. So I can’t quite say whether they’re strong enough to break the skin, but they’re strong enough to send vibrations down a 2 foot long stick.
In any other city in the world, I encounter insects with 10-100x the frequency.
I think it is partially the cool weather that slows them down and the long dry season. It seems especially hard on the typical flying insects that tend to annoy people. Most of the insect life I've seen prefers to root around deep in the topsoil where it is presumably warmer and not as dry.
Western Europe is similar. Coming from New England it blew my mind they barely even know what insect screens are in France/Germany/Switzerland. Just an unbelievable lack of insects compared to the eastern US.
There used to be a lot. Half of all insect species are in decline. San Francisco State has researchers monitoring the decline of the insect population in the city itself. One of them can be reached for further comment:
Gretchen LeBuhn https://biology.sfsu.edu/faculty/lebuhn
Ah yes i heard of that, the Bubonic plague traveled in/on? shipping containers.
Is that a stupid AI or a stupid Human who writes articles like that?
I tried to grow crickets to make flour out of them, but it was much harder than I thought, those spiders seem easier, and are also meatier.
Wait til you hear about chickens, or deer!
In theory the spider might prey on the hornet, but sparrow hornets are large and strong enough that I suspect it would take a very busy spider to envenom one, and avoid being stung in the process, before the hornet broke free of the web. Too, wasps and hornets see much more acutely than many realize, and likely have a decent chance of seeing and dodging webs - I did once see a bumblebee caught in a red orb weaver's web, but never yet a wasp or hornet, for whatever that's worth. (I have seen a drunk bald-faced yellowjacket sleeping it off on my porch, with an orb weaver web in direct line between her and the fig tree, but I don't know that she didn't get there before the spider had spun her web for the night.)
Sparrow hornets also aren't known yet to have made it east of the Rockies, and the intervening terrain would be very difficult for them at least, more likely impossible. That said, they and Jorō spiders hail from much the same origin and may regularly share territory, in which case their relationships are probably fairly well known - I'd likely be able to say more here, except that I don't read Japanese and thus can't review the relevant literature.
Can they survive -20C?
Looking at the headline and the comparison to bubonic plague (which apparently spread via shipping containers several centuries ago), I wonder if it's just a first article or Axios's future direction.
For those wondering what this comment is referencing, here is the original article: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2022/03/09/giant-j...
For what it's worth, I got a chuckle out of the original. I can definitely appreciate the sentiment, as I have unknowingly walked into a quite few Joro spider webs and it never fails to creep me out.
It's based on that SCP.