Science is Fun Fridays!
It's incredibly creepy, I sure hate spiders, but it's also incredibly cool.
For more than a century, scientists thought the wind carried them across the seas, but they're actually cruising Earth's electrical field on their silk.
When their silk leaves their body, it is negatively charged, and repels the similarly negatively charged surfaces on which the spider sits, creating enough force to lift them in the air.
Like the hairs on the back of our neck respond to electricity, so do the trichobothria hairs on a spider. When an electrical field was turned on during a flight simulation study, the spiders would move to an edge point, release some silk, and wait to be carried off.
A comment on this video says, "Every pilot knows that spiders fly."
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