Posted on 12/07/2023 4:32:00 PM PST by Libloather
A venomous eight-inch-long spider native to Asia, whose palm-sized females cannibalize their male mates, is flying up America's east coast and spreading out west.
Experts say the Jorō spider can fly 50 to 100 miles at a stretch, using their webbing as a parasail to glide in the wind, and it's now also hitching rides up east coast highways - but the creatures aren't known to pose a threat to humans or pets.
However, the jury is still out on the impact that this giant spider, which is believed to have first arrived in the US a decade ago via shipping containers arriving in Georgia, might have on local wildlife.
One thing that is certain, according to an ecologist at Rutgers University's Lockwood Lab in New Jersey, who spoke with DailyMail.com: 'Soon enough, possibly even next year, they should be in New Jersey and New York.'
'Because their main methods of dispersal are to either 'balloon' with the wind, or hitch rides on cars,' PhD student and ecologist José R. Ramírez-Garofalo told DailyMail.com, 'they are generally going to spread to where the wind blows, or where humans are.'
Ramírez-Garofalo, who currently conducts research for Rutgers' Lockwood Lab, added that while the Jorō spider will likely be able to take advantage of warming temperatures along the northeastern seaboard, their hitchhiking and parachuting methods are sure to take them farther than some other invasives.
'Their range expansion is more complicated than the typical northward expansion that you see with a lot of species under current climate conditions,' Ramírez-Garofalo told DailyMail.com.
'Right now, we are seeing them dispersing into Maryland,' as the ecologist recently told Staten Island Advance. 'It is a matter of when, not if.'
Last month, other ecological and entomological researchers in New York, Tennessee, Texas and South Carolina pooled...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
“The article says “venomous” but I don’t think that is right.”
It’s right.
Why do we get all the world’s invaders? I’m going to take a bunch of chiggers and deer ticks to China
We killed off a bunch of them at my Mom’s house across the street. And I’ve got them on the chicken wire cages around my blueberry bushes at our rural property. I spray them with some non toxic ant spray and it seems to thin them out.
Now, maybe if you call them “Murder Spiders”, you’d rope in a few suckers.
Let the winds carry them around the lost provinces of the eastern fringe, Stay away from the rest of the country.
“Why do we get all the world’s invaders? I’m going to take a bunch of chiggers and deer ticks to China”
I have a list too. Sand fleas, coyotes, nosee’ums, Canadian soldiers, New York City pigeons, and Maine black flies.
“Not need help!”
Eek! That’s how I felt when I lived in Charleston, S.C., and was ‘introduced’ to the state bug: The Palmetto Bug
aka giant flying ROACH!
I recall using near an entire can of RAID on one stubbornly energetic Palmetto on my bedroom ceiling. It (finally) killed him DEAD! Of course, my bedroom smelled like bug spray for the next three days. All linen had to be thrown out.
Egad! Those giant roaches they so genteel-y call “Palmetto Bugs”!
When I was in the Navy down at Cecil Field in Florida, I woke one night in my barracks when I heard a slight scuffing noise and thought “What the hell is that?”
I turned on my light to find the biggest roach I had ever seen, scurrying across the deck. (I could actually HEAR the damn thing scuttling about!)
Without hesitation, I leaped out of my rack, grabbed one of my black boondockers, and ran straight at the thing trying to smash the thing holding the boot by the tip and using the heel as the hammer.
I smacked at it three or four times, missing with each try, and the thing scurried under the crack at the bottom of the door and ran into the hallway.
Too pumped up, and thinking I would never get back to sleep with a monster like THAT lurking in the barracks, I opened the door and ran after it into the hallway in my white, Navy issue boxer shorts, whacking frantically at this thing.
Finally, I scored a blow, and the beast made a loud sickening crack as the heel of the shoe came down on top of it. I froze, and when I lifted the shoe off of the dead thing (or so I thought) it suddenly took to flight!
It scared the crap out of me! I didn’t even know those things had wings and could even fly, but what was more unsettling was the fact that it seemed to be about the size of a baseball as it took to the the air, wings beating like mad.
A big, wing-beating thing the circumference of a baseball!
Another private joke of Mother Nature.
Bugs. When I was a kid, there was no bug I wouldn’t capture and hold in my hands (except the obvious biting and stinging ones!)
Now?
A bug crawls on me, it dies. With prejudice. Especially spiders.
I used to catch bumblebees and honeybees. Keep them in an empty. Nestea jar, which was long like a flask. Catch and release, assuming they lived overnight.
Ant farms too.
I lived in the Philippines, they had enormous beetles with horns and stuff. Tiger Beetles, Rhinoceros Beetles, Ox Beetles...
Stepping on those things was a gooey crunchy mess
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