Electric Fields Elicit Ballooning in Spiders
Taken by Soheil_Esy on July 5, 2018 @
Tehran, I.R.I.
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Date Taken: 2018:06:23 05:00:43
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Details:
SPACEWEATHER AND SPIDER BALLOONING: When one thinks of airborne organisms, spiders do not usually come to mind. However, these wingless arthropods have been found 4 km up in the sky [1], dispersing hundreds of kilometers [2]. To disperse, spiders “balloon,” whereby they climb to the top of a prominence, let out silk, and float away. The prevailing view is that drag forces from light wind allow spiders to become airborne [3], yet ballooning mechanisms are not fully explained by current aerodynamic models [4, 5]. The global atmospheric electric circuit and the resulting atmospheric potential gradient (APG) [6] provide an additional force that has been proposed to explain ballooning [7].
Source:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)30693-6
Photographer's website:
http://https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)30693-6
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