Giant and poisonous yellow spiders were Going up the East Coastand people may start spotting them in New Jersey, New York and even southern Canada as early as this year.
The invasive Joro Spidernative to East Asia, he was the first found in Georgia in 2013. The spiders remain mainly in the Southeast, but researchers predict they will head north because they are better suited to colder climates.
The creatures are characterized by their bright color and large size. Female Joro spiders are yellow and black, with bodies the size of a paperclip and legs that can stretch up to 10 centimeters from side to side. Male Joro spiders are smaller and brown. They are orb weavers, meaning they create flat, circular webs.
Joro spiders have drawn attention on social media recently, but experts say there is no cause for concern. Almost all spiders are venomous — including these ones — but only a small fraction have venom that could seriously harm a human, said Gustavo Hormiga, a biology professor at George Washington University.
He compared a Joro spider bite to a bee sting. Some people may have a negative reaction, but Hormiga said he has not yet heard of any cases that could be considered clinically important.
He described the spiders as “very shy.”
“They have no interest in biting you,” Hormiga said, so they would probably only do it in self-defense.
Still, people may want to keep an eye out for spiders’ large webs: A single Joro spider can be 3 feet wide, but a crowded web containing several females can span 10 foot.
Andy Davis, a research scientist at the University of Georgia’s Odum School of Ecology, said larger relatives of the Joro spider are fried “like shrimp” and sold as a snack at street markets in East Asia.
Joro spiders can survive in a wide range of conditions, he added.
“Joro spiders seem perfectly content living in a gas station pump as well as living in a tree in the forest,” he said.
Davis said spiders react to stressors like noise differently than other spiders he has studied. In his laboratory, Davis tested the spider’s “shyness” by directing a small puff of air at it. Joro the spider responded by freezing for an hour. Many other animals, on the contrary, would react more, and this tendency would make it difficult for them to live in a stressful environment in the long term.
But Joro spiders’ lack of reaction allows them to create webs in surprising places, such as at traffic lights above busy intersections, Davis said.
“If they can live in these disturbed areas as much as they can live in natural areas, that means there is nothing stopping them from living anywhere in this country,” he said.
There’s no way to predict exactly when the spiders will arrive in the Northeast, since their movement is random, said David Nelsen, an arachnologist and biology professor at Southern Adventist University in Tennessee.
“Because you have the color and the size and that element of fear, they are very, very exciting,” Nelsen said, although he guessed that “New Yorkers won’t see these anytime soon.”
Although stories about flying spiders have circulated, Nelsen said they are mostly misunderstood. Adults don’t do this, he said, but baby Joro spiders have the ability to inflate, an action Nelsen compared to dandelion seeds being caught in the wind. Just like seeds, spiders disperse randomly based on wind and electromagnetic currents.
“There have been reports of spiders as high as commercial airliners, 30,000 feet in the air, being dropped,” Nelsen said.
Joro spiders of all ages can also hitch a ride in a car, without the driver’s knowledge, and end up in a new state, according to Davis.
Being relatively harmless to humans does not entirely eliminate the threat of spiders. They are invasive, and Nelsen’s research has shown that when too many Joro spiders live in an area for too long, native spider populations decline.
“There is a lot of evidence to suggest that when an ecosystem loses species, which is what may be happening in this case, that ecosystem becomes very, very imbalanced and can collapse.”
Nelsen said more research is needed to determine whether Joro spiders are the cause of this decline.
For now, Hormiga said, spiders do not pose scientifically documented problems for the local environment. But it will take years for scientists to understand its long-term effects.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
