New study suggests Joro spiders are shy

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-massive-joro-spiders-gentle-giants.html

by wglb • 3 years ago

38 40 3 years ago

Nightmare fuel nonetheless. Thank you, HN.

As a kid growing up in Florida, I remember a scary moment when an old man walking towards his car brushed up against the web of a very large Joro spider, which stuck to his back, right before he opened up his car and drove away. The spider must have been at least 6 inches in diameter if not more. I was worried the man could have gotten into a car accident after being surprised by the giant creature. I should have tried to stop him, but I was really young, had no time to react, and he was between one and two hundred feet away (I have good long distance eyesight). That was at Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, which had so many of these spiders.

ChuckNorris89• 3 years ago

an old man walking towards his car brushed up against the web of a very large Joro spider, which stuck to his back, right before he opened up his car and drove away.

As someone with arachnophobia, what a terrible day to be able to read.

Luckily in Europe don't have these huge and poisonous spiders found in places like the US and Australia.

dreamcompiler2• 3 years ago

Bad news: Almost all spiders are technically venomous, in that they have venom glands that produce a toxin they use to incapacitate their prey.

Good news: Very few (like about 6) spider families are potentially dangerous to humans. Most spiders rarely bite us, or their fangs are not big enough to penetrate our skin, or their venom is not potent enough or voluminous enough to hurt us.

Spiders have a bad rap. I'd much rather have spiders in my house than flies or mosquitos.

digging2• 3 years ago

As someone with arachnophobia, what a terrible day to be able to read.

Although I can't fault someone for having arachnophobia, as it's extremely common and we're potentially hard-wired to be susceptible to it, I encourage you to open your mind to the possibility of seeing spiders as incredibly beautiful.

Exposure to images online might be the easiest way to start, but seeing them in 3D is more impactful. I grew up terribly arachnophobic, and in my 20s I decided that (because I was living in a place brimming with spiders[1]) I would stop being arachnophobic. I decided to actively suppress my reactions first, simply to not panic, and over time that genuinely reduced my fear. Eventually I began to appreciate the weirdness and coolness of their little hydraulic bodies, and to see them as the valuable and amazing creatures they are. Truly, my life would be less full without spiders.

[1] I later learned that this is actually true pretty much everywhere.

causi2• 3 years ago

From personal experience, knowing a daddy long-legs isn't dangerous or even technically a spider doesn't help when one crawls out of your bike helmet onto your face.

bodangly• 3 years ago

Ha. I lived in Oxford for a year and the first day I arrived at my flat, there was a giant house spider. To this day it’s the biggest spider I’ve ever seen.

nerdix• 3 years ago

Are you sure it was a Joro? They are relatively new to North America. Believed to have come first to Georgia via a shipping container from Asia in 2013-14.

This article suggests that if Joros are in Florida at all, it is a recent phenomenon

https://www.wesh.com/article/east-coast-parachuting-spiders/...

kcplate• 3 years ago

Not the original commenter, but I wrinkled my brow at that 2013-2014 date because what we call a “Banana Spider” down here looks really similar to a Joro…so I can understand if there was some assumption that they were the same.

Growing up in the woods of Florida you become all too familiar with them.

https://www.imagineourflorida.org/banana-spider/

GolDDranks• 3 years ago

A fun fact! Jorō (女郎) is Japanese and means a prostitute. Indeed, in Japanese folklore it is said that a Joro spider is a seductress that can change its appearance into a beautiful women to lure in men to devour.

wing-_-nuts• 3 years ago

"They're more afraid of you than you are of them"

Oh really? Do they flee in girlish screams of terror? Because otherwise...

ilyagr• 3 years ago

No, they act similarly to how I would act if a giant suddenly knocked over the roof of my house and started poking about. Hide under a bed or in the basement, hoping it won't care to find me and will go away eventually. Except these particular spiders wait paralyzed by terror for an hour after all the sounds stop, just in case.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 3 years ago

So, they're some of the more intelligent spiders. I can respect this "can't be too careful" attitude of theirs.

blamazon• 3 years ago

In my experience they tend to flee upwards - in the extremely unfortunate event you get one of these on you, (I've walked into their webs several times) I recommend raising your arms near a tree, it will probably scamper up and away.

onetimeusename• 3 years ago

hiyer• 3 years ago

Thanks. This will likely be my nightmare when I go to sleep tonight.

standardUser• 3 years ago

I have to imagine they have a huge impact on the ecosystem. When I saw them in Mexico (near Puerto Vallarta), they had blanketed over the entire trail with dense webs. It covered virtually all of the open aerial space in the forest. There's so many of them and they're so large, they must be eating a ton of the available food.

Mountain_Skies• 3 years ago

They took over my yard last summer. Even my weather station got the anemometer so wrapped up in Joro webs that it couldn't move anymore. Any part of the yard I hadn't been in for more than a couple of days, I'd carry a stick to clear the way. I felt bad for delivery drivers because houses like mine with a breezeway to the front door were guaranteed to have several Joro webs at body level. If I had a delivery scheduled, I'd go out in the morning and clear a path. Hopefully birds will take a liking to the spiders and their numbers will be kept in check. Combine this with the newly arrived kudzu beetles that are reducing the biomass of kudzu, Georgia and surrounding states are in for a good bit of change this decade.

havblue2• 3 years ago

Think about all the mosquitos, stink bugs, yellow jackets and false ladybugs they're eating though. Pretty much everything they eat is something you don't want in your yard. I try to leave the webs intact, but I guess I'd feel differently if my yard went "Kingdom of the Spiders" like yours did.

lukas0992• 3 years ago

How do we know they aren't eating beneficial insects as well?

memetomancer• 3 years ago

I had a look at this paper, and in the citations I see two papers from Jonathan Pruitt!

For those unfamiliar, Jonathan Pruitt is a _former_ Professor charged with falsifying massive amounts of data relating to spider behavior. I was under the impression that most of his papers had been retracted.

I was not expecting anyone to reference his work. I will have to check it out, to see if this is still commonplace in the field - based on the hubbub and furor and #Pruittgate hashtags during the pandemic years, I was under the impression that spider biology was set back 10 years and nobody would touch the guy with a 10-foot pole.

radicaldreamer• 3 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if he was responsible for that fake spiders on drugs meme as well.

zamnos• 3 years ago

I don't know about the meme, but the spider webs done by drugged spiders dates back to 1948, by Swiss pharmacologist Peter N. Witt and later repeated elsewhere. If there's questions as to it's veracity, it's not mentioned in the Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_psychoactive_drugs_o...

bee_rider• 3 years ago

I know ecologists are always concerned about invasive species, but I do sometimes wonder… in the natural world, species sometimes end up moving from place to place, they compete, one of them (maybe the former outsider) wins, and a new status quo is established. Is it really so bad?

I mean, it you own an apple orchard and some sort of apple eating bug shows up, that’ll ruin your business. But that’s just humans trying to impose order on the more dynamic natural world.

I can’t really get too worried about these invasive, unusually peaceful spiders. And they are pretty.

e_i_pi_2• 3 years ago

in the natural world, species sometimes end up moving from place to place

I think the difference here is the small scale for time and the large scale for space. With humans moving these animals around the planet and mixing ecosystems you end up forcing competition that reduces overall biodiversity.

A great example is "outdoor cats" - they're brought in by people and end up endangering the local small fauna. It's not "bad" if you like cats and don't like birds, but it leads to less species overall and I think that's the main concern.

that’s just humans trying to impose order on the more dynamic natural world

I'd argue in this case nature is less dynamic and slow moving, we're causing the disruption - not failing to handle a natural change.

kjkjadksj• 3 years ago

As long as we aren't jettisoning tons of organic material off planet we are fine. Sometimes an asteroid hits the planet, that certainly kills things a lot faster than we ever could, and this disturbance exposed ecological niches that our ancestors took advantage of leading to our own time on this planet.

olliecornelia• 3 years ago

I thought everyone knew they were just freaky looking orb weavers, is this a revelation?

pvaldes• 3 years ago

https://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2...

Made from joro spider (AKA golden orb spider) silk.

New study suggests Joro spiders are shy

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