Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Science

Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity (vice.com) 164

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: On Halloween in 1832, the naturalist Charles Darwin was onboard the HMS Beagle. He marveled at spiders that had landed on the ship after floating across huge ocean distances. "I caught some of the Aeronaut spiders which must have come at least 60 miles," he noted in his diary. "How inexplicable is the cause which induces these small insects, as it now appears in both hemispheres, to undertake their aerial excursions." Small spiders achieve flight by aiming their butts at the sky and releasing tendrils of silk to generate lift.

Darwin thought that electricity might be involved when he noticed that spider silk stands seemed to repel each other with electrostatic force, but many scientists assumed that the arachnids, known as "ballooning" spiders, were simply sailing on the wind like a paraglider. The wind power explanation has thus far been unable to account for observations of spiders rapidly launching into the air, even when winds are low, however. Now, these aerial excursions have been empirically determined to be largely powered by electricity, according to new research published Thursday in Current Biology. Led by Erica Morley, a sensory biophysicist at the University of Bristol, the study settles a longstanding debate about whether wind energy or electrostatic forces are responsible for spider ballooning locomotion.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity More

Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity

Comments Filter:
  • good - now they'll have to deny electricity exists. That should be fun...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      But electricity is needed to keep Earth's flat disk together.

    • It's like gravity, just a theory with no proof. :-)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gnick ( 1211984 )

        It's like gravity, just a theory with no proof.

        Proof? There's obvious proof that gravity is a hoax. When I drop a pencil, I can observe the ground rushing up toward it at 9.8 m/s/s. This is proof that disc-Earth is under constant linear acceleration. You might think we'd reach c after about a year, but for an explanation of why that doesn't occur I refer you to Einstein's papers on the subject. Of course, you have to read them in the original Hebrew before they were censored by NASA.

        Besides, if gravity is real, and our planet is a sphere, then which way

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Spiders are very wise (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Sunday July 08, 2018 @04:58PM (#56913254) Homepage

    “Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They'll believe anything they see in print.”
      E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

  • Obviously (Score:3)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Sunday July 08, 2018 @05:20PM (#56913320) Homepage Journal

    They build a charge by scuffing across the carpet. Humans can't fly because with only 2 feet we can only generate 1/4th the charge.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Agripa ( 139780 )

      They build a charge by scuffing across the carpet. Humans can't fly because with only 2 feet we can only generate 1/4th the charge.

      That explains why aircraft cabins are carpeted.

  • This proves spiders are alien life forms!

  • No "Spidernado"-movie was made, yet? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Sunday July 08, 2018 @05:27PM (#56913348)
    How come Hollywood has not turned this into a monster-movie, yet? I mean, they made multiple such movies about flying sharks...

  • So (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    We just need to harvest this silk then we have easy space travel. To think we've been fucking about with rockets until now.

  • I wonder if plants do it too. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Sunday July 08, 2018 @05:56PM (#56913452) Journal

    I wonder if plants do it, too.

    A number of plants have windborne seeds surrounded or mounted beneath a thready structure. (Dandelions, cottonwood, and milkweed come to mind immediately.) Other structures could also get some assistance from electriec lift. Charge would be a good thing to look for.

    We already know that plants use piezoelectricity to increase cell growth on the concave side of a loaded branch in order to grow upward or outward. Why not another electrical hack?

    Why should spiders - or the animal kingdom in general - have all the fun?

    • I'm just wondering if this technology can be scaled up to something human-sized. Could this improve the efficiency of personal aircraft designs?

      • I'm just wondering if this technology can be scaled up to something human-sized.

        It might be interesting to use it, not as primary lift, but as trim lift, on a dirigible.

        With essentially neutral bouyancy it doesn't take a lot to make the difference between climbing, hovering, and dropping. Meanwhile, the craft has an enormous area to acquire force from the charge's interaction with the atmosphere's ambient field, while the shape is just about ideal for avoiding corona losses.

        You'd want to go zero charge for

    • We already know that plants use piezoelectricity to increase cell growth on the concave side of a loaded branch in order to grow upward or outward.

      HAH! This is really cool. Can you point me to a reference somewhere? I'd love to read about this. Cursory googling is polluted by articles about small scale energy harvesting. Second and third levels of search turn up 20 year old German papers on the material properties of wood without mention of the influence on plant growth.

      • We already know that plants use piezoelectricity to increase cell growth on the concave side of a loaded branch in order to grow upward or outward.

        Can you point me to a reference somewhere?

        Wish I could. I saw that in a civil-service-level electrical engineering trade journal some time in the 1950s or early '60s (that I found in a pile of discarded magazines, when I was a kid with a serious electronics hobby.)

        The article was about engineering around possible problems with a high voltage cross-country DC pow

  • The implications for Spider-Man are profound.

  • Thus (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Sunday July 08, 2018 @07:49PM (#56913890)
    Spiders invented electric vehicles before humans.

  • A fantastic example of "doesn't scale"? (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Sunday July 08, 2018 @08:10PM (#56913954) Journal

    I think perhaps this is a fantastic example of something that "doesn't scale". If we tried to build a flying machine that used electrostatic forces, we'd just break down the air resistance and create lots of lightning bolts. The spider only needs a little force, because it's tiny. Electrostatic force is enough to fly a spider without throwing sparks.

  • Doomed, I tell you. DOOMED!

  • From what I understand, the most significant force is the pull towards magnetic north. Do all these spiders drift north?

    And since pure magnets do not even have the force required to do anything noticeable(they are not even particularly light), now in the hell does a spider? How does a spider generate more electromagnetic force per mass than the strongest magnets ever devised? I have never heard of any technology where humans were able to create something that hovered using ambient electrostatic forces.

    • Likely it uses electrostatic forces to fine tune the 'air foil' on the fly.. note it's not flying in vacuum; so surely it's riding on the air/wind however slow the wind may be. By minutely n instantly adjusting the airfoil, you can create the lift needed.

    • How does a spider generate more electromagnetic force per mass than the strongest magnets ever devised?

      It doesn't. It doesn't generate any notable EMF.

      I have never heard of any technology where humans were able to create something that hovered using ambient electrostatic forces.

      What does that have to do with anything?

    • How does a spider generate more electromagnetic force per mass than the strongest magnets ever devised?

      They don't. They're holding on to a really good static charge accumulator, and then using the Earth's magnetic field to get a little bit of lift out of it. You can do it too, but the electric potentials required to move you noticeably are going to be more than enough to bridge the distance from your tether to the ground (your head)
      You likely wouldn't survive the experience.

      • But what is the difference between a static charge, and an electromagnet?

        • I'm confused by that question...
          The spider isn't generating the force...
          The spider web accumulates a static charge, being a long enough tether, there is a potential difference at the anode, and current will flow, which means the Lorentz force is now giving some force to the spider system. The spider is just along for the ride.

          As I said before, the problem with a human is the amount of current/charge required to lift you.
          The necessary insulators (air, and the tether) break down at currents required to g

          • I don't mean (why don't we use this to allow humans to fly), but why for example junkyard electromagnets do not float when such high current is run through them (ar they at least lighter?). Certainly they must have a higher energy potential per mass than the spider and its silk?

            Or do electromagnetic forces work completely differently than electrostatic forces?

            Are these spiders even drifting primarily north, or is this not even related to magnetic north in the slightest?

            • Are these spiders even drifting primarily north

              Good question. I'd bet they do, though.
              I suspect local weather patterns have a lot more to do with where they end up, though.

              I don't mean (why don't we use this to allow humans to fly), but why for example junkyard electromagnets do not float when such high current is run through them (ar they at least lighter?). Certainly they must have a higher energy potential per mass than the spider and its silk?

              OK, I think I see what you're asking.
              The problem there is density.
              It would take a very long and very powerfully charged electrodynamic tether to lift a human. It would have to push against a lot of the earth's field. Your electromagnet is quite dense, and is pushing on a comparatively small amount of flux from a very weak field.
              I imagine it would levitate diamagnetically against t

  • Old Charlie was wrong about one thing, if his diary quote is accurate. Spiders are members of the Arachnida class, while insects belong with the Insecta. Eight legs vs. six legs. http://www.differencebetween.n... [differencebetween.net] Perhaps he hadn't gotten around to inventing these classes yet?
  • And there is no doubt that the article was sponsored by Tesla!
  • Quick, someone tell Musk how they do it.
  • Is this the same Darwin who brilliantly discovered that the theory of genetics was just some preposterous, religious nonsense made up by some Jesus freaks?

    Or was it the Darwin who thought some some human sub species (i.e. "whites") were better than other sub species?

    Oh, yeah. Let's pass that guy the microphone ...

Slashdot Top Deals

If all else fails, lower your standards.

Close