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Ballooning, sometimes called kiting, is a process by which spiders, and some other small invertebrates, move through the air by releasing one or more gossamer threads to catch the wind, causing them to become airborne at the mercy of air currents and electric fields.
Charles Darwin noted spiders landing on his ship 60 miles from the coast of Argentina during a 1832 voyage. Today, ballooning spiders blanket a town in Australia, leaving a film of silk.
For more than a century, scientists thought it was the wind that carried them, sometimes as high as a jet stream — in a process known as “ballooning.” A new study shows that the Earth’s electric...
Ballooning spiders operate within this planetary electric field. When their silk leaves their bodies, it typically picks up a negative charge. This repels the similar negative charges on the...
Although it’s hard to know for sure, ballooning has been credited with helping spiders colonize habitats both broad and narrow. Himalayan jumping spiders—the highest-living animals on the...
The spiders did not release their silk balloons at random, the team found. Instead, they raised one or two hairy legs aloft, apparently testing the wind for 5 to 8 seconds.
Co-author Moonsung Cho, an aerodynamic engineer at the Technical University of Berlin, was inspired after spotting several wild ballooning spiders during a walk through the city's Lilienthal...
By James Gorman. Sometimes spiders ride the wind. They spin out lines of silk that are caught by the breeze and carry them aloft. They have been reported to rise a mile or two above the earth,...
Many spiders fly long distances by riding "balloons" of silk, and a new study suggests that they're propelled by more than just the wind. Electric fields at strengths found in nature can also...
Spider ballooning is a phenomenon in which spiders employ silk threads to travel through the air for dispersal. While this behaviour has been extensively studied in agricultural areas, limited research has been conducted in urban environments, where green spaces are highly fragmented.