17
votes
Spiders use Earth's electric field to fly hundreds of miles
Link information
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- Title
- Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity
- Authors
- Ed Yong
- Published
- Jul 5 2018
- Word count
- 888 words
That's fascinating! From the title I thought they must mean they use the magnetic fields of the earth for navigation, but no, apparently their silk picks up enough static electricity to levitate them. That's sorta insane.
I've heard of ionic levitation which use electrokinetics, and I've heard of eletrodynamic tethers which work like a spiders web, but generate electricity or lift via electromagnetism. I've never heard of any real-world example of electrostatic levitation before though.
Edit: makes you wonder if you could do something like this human scale with a very
large parachutelong kite and a van-de-graff generator or something similar...Yeah, I thought it was amazing that they were able to "lift off" inside closed boxes using the fields. This sort of thing is fascinating to me—spiders are able to sense, interact with, and even travel using an element of the world that we're almost completely oblivious to. That's such a strange concept to think about.
Spiders are just such old creatures. Humans have existed for a hundred thousand years. Spiders have been around for tens of millions. Before mushrooms and fungus existed, giant spiders crawled over mountains of dead trees that couldn't decompose. They really are amazing creatures.
A complete tangent, but- in my mind, this discovery adds a bit of weight to the idea of electromagnetic hypersensitivity in humans, which many people quickly dismiss as bunk or a psychosomatic disorder. But I believe it's likely to be a real thing. If these tiny spiders can detect, and evolved to fly on electromagnetic waves, is it that hard to imagine that there's a minority of humans that can also feel electromagnetic waves?
Even if human organs are 100% resistant to the electromagnetic waves in question (wifi, cell towers, etc.), what about all the microorganisms living inside us? Gut bacteria have been a recent fad in health research (with merit, as far as I know) -- what if a small percentage of those microorganisms react to electromagnetic waves, and have the potential to indirectly cause adverse symptoms in humans?
As with many things with the human body, what I'm suggesting would differ from person to person, like allergies.
If it was real and worked like it did with spiders, flies etc. why would it hurt? You would just feel it and maybe it would feel weird but it wouldn’t hurt.
People who claim to have EMS gets hurt if they know there is even a very small amount of EM waves. It just doesn’t make sense.
Goats and deer eat poison ivy but it causes rashes in humans. I love peanuts and peanut butter but if my friend eats them she'll die. Of course different species behave differently, and even individual organisms within a species may react differently to the same stimuli. You're not surprised by those examples, yet why is EHS outside the realm of possibility for you? The human body is complex.
The utter lack of scientific evidence, as described by the very article you linked?
I'd actually be prepared to believe that humans could be "sensitive" to electromagnetic fields, if only because I've felt enough static in my life, but EHS as it's most commonly understood is either psychosomatic at best or total fraud at worst.
If saying "it's complex" was a valid form of discussion, idiots would rule.
Now, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying it doesn't make biological sense, and if it does please correct me. I'd love to learn more about this.
There are a ton of genetic mutations that do not make sense in the context of biological adaptation. This is because the mechanism of adaptation is random change. Sometimes changes happen randomly but have no effect on survival rates and are just carried on through genes in perpetuity.