ISSUE #37: It’s About Time We Got a New Spider

Putting everyone’s fears to rest.

In case you haven’t heard, a new spider dropped! It’s the Joro spider, and it’s coming to an Eastern American metropolitan area near you. Specifically, it’s coming to New York and New Jersey, allegedly, this summer—this spider has already dropped in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Maryland, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, so it’s old news there by now. But because NYC is the center of the universe, the Joro spider is national news. 

personally I think they’re very pretty!

Bugstack has already been scooped by Gothamist and various other news outlets with sensationalist fearmongering headlines, but I will provide a short yet comprehensive recap here all the same. The Joro spider, Trichonephila clavata, is an invasive spider from East Asia—a native of China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan—and has been introduced to North America as recently as 2013, when the first sighting was confirmed in Hoschton, Georgia. Since then, it’s been steadily moving up the East Coast, and many scientists believe it will become naturalized here, thriving like any native spider. 

The biased lamestream media has attempted to make a meal out of three of the Joro spider’s main characteristics: it’s really big, it’s venomous, and it moves around by “parachuting” on strands of web. This is all true, but it’s not as life threatening as some would have you believe. 

Joro spiders are quite big. The females’ bodies are nearly an inch long, with legs that can span up to four inches (the males are smaller, as is tradition), and they spin large orb webs that can span up to three meters. But we already have big spiders here, wolf spiders and tarantulas and enormous yellow garden spiders that spin zigzag patterns in the center of their webs. What’s one more? Also, their webs are cool—where regular orb weaver spiders spin flat webs like the sort you’d draw on a piece of paper, Joro webs have three layers: one in the center, and two irregularly shaped layers in front and behind. 

hand for scale

Joro spiders are also venomous, but so are basically all spiders, so I don’t get why this is the thing everyone keeps fussing over. They will bite, but are apparently pretty docile as spiders go, and completely harmless to humans. Get over it! They are, however, the inspiration for the Jorōgumo, a legendary Japanese entity that can shapeshift into a beautiful woman to seduce young men, trapping them in her web and eating them. 

The third little factoid everyone keeps bringing up is the fact that they move by parachuting through the air with their webs, which is a real thing that a lot of spiders do, and not as crazy as it sounds. Due to the steady way the Joro spiders have creeped up the coast of the U.S., it’s believed that they move around by “ballooning,” literally attaching themselves to strands of web and letting the wind blow them around until they land on something. But they do it when they’re tiny babies, not giant adults, which would weigh an airborne web down. We don’t necessarily have to worry about an infestation of giant spiders zooming around our precious Manhattan skyscrapers, though that would probably lower the rent citywide, so hmmm. 

Here’s a video of some spiders ballooning, which looks just as funny as it sounds. 

This behavior has given life to an urban legend beloved by Reddit about a “layer of spiders” floating around in the atmosphere, made up of billions of tiny arachnids that got caught on a breeze and never came down. It’s not real, but it does sound like the kind of thing that wouldn’t be out of place in a Dark Tower novel. 

The thing that I personally think is interesting about the Joro spiders is that, while they’re invasive, they don’t seem to be making a pest of themselves as much as other invasive species tend to do here (I’ll get to the lanternflies, I promise) and have even been making themselves useful, catching other invasives our native predators tend to shun, like the brown marmorated stink bug. Our world is more interconnected than ever, and foreign bugs making their homes on our turf is just something we ought to get used to. New York can stand to add one more spider to our cultural melting pot. 

IN BUG NEWS:

[Wilco voice] They’re putting cicadas in Malört.