{"id":175987,"date":"2023-11-13T17:22:46","date_gmt":"2023-11-13T23:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/spiders-can-fly-and-they-dont-even-need-wings-study-claims"},"modified":"2023-11-13T17:22:46","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T23:22:46","slug":"spiders-can-fly-and-they-dont-even-need-wings-study-claims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/spiders-can-fly-and-they-dont-even-need-wings-study-claims","title":{"rendered":"Spiders Can Fly and They Don\u2019t Even Need Wings, Study Claims"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If you have any form of Arachnophobia, do not read this article. You\u2019ve been warned. Now if you\u2019re like me and have a mad respect for Mother Nature, I posit you this query. Did you know that spiders can fly? And not by the way you may think.<\/p>\n

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Good news for your nightmares: Spiders can fly. Despite not having wings, new research shows that spiders have the ability to propel themselves using the Earth\u2019s electric field, with little to no help from wind or webs. Because humans can\u2019t feel these electric currents, their role in biology can often go ignored. But if electrostatic is what is helping spiders fly more than two miles high in the air, let\u2019s pay attention.<\/p>\n

In a study published in Current Biology<\/a><\/em> on Thursday, Drs. Erica L. Morley and Daniel Robert of the University of Bristol found that when spiders are placed in a chamber with no wind but a small electric field, they were still able to to fly, despite the prevailing idea that a spider\u2019s flight was reliant on wind currents.<\/p>\n

When spiders are airborne, a behavior that\u2019s often described as \u201cballooning,\u201d most observers assumed that their movement is influenced by air streams. However, this prevailing view couldn\u2019t explain why larger spiders are airborne for extended periods of time, nor could any current aerodynamic models explain these vague ballooning mechanisms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you have any form of Arachnophobia, do not read this article. You\u2019ve been warned. Now if you\u2019re like me and have a mad respect for Mother Nature, I posit you this query. Did you know that spiders can fly? And not by the way you may think. Good news for your nightmares: Spiders can [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":702,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/702"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}