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This episodes uses the "Southern European Summer" soundscape, which I made from INaturalist recordings. You can find the details credits on the dedicated page.
Picture yourself standing on the tip of a leaf, looking at the canopy surface of the oak you climbed.
[forest soundscape fades is]
You are Erigone, the black dwarf spider, from family Linyphiidae, and with the wonderful weather of this summer afternoon, you are going to travel… via air ways!
Hi and welcome to the Insect Insights, chill insect stories to relax and wonder, available wherever podcasts are. If you like this podcast, you can subscribe, leave a review and even an insect question, on spotify or on the website. I am Max, your host, and I hope you are ready to dive into insect knowledge for another insight!
You feel a soft wind pass through your small sensory setae, and this is the last signal you need to know its time to take off. You stretch your eight legs, pointing the tip of your butt high toward the sky. You then let your spinnerets work, these small organs which are in charge of turning your silk protein into thread.
As the infinitely thin thread starts to come out of your rear end, it is instantly caught by the wind to be carried away and up. Soon enough, there will be sufficient thread length to carry your weight, and you will fly away like a minuscule air balloon.
But it’s not only the wind giving you lift… There’s another invisible force, pulling you up. The electricity surrounding you! The electrostatic forces in the atmosphere, even strongly than the air itself, is what you are sailing with.
Your silk, negatively charged, is attracted to the positive charges in the sky, and pushed away from the ground. Here, on your leaf, you found a nice little spot to take off. The tree acts like an embassy for the negatively charged ground, interfacing with the air several dozens meters away from it. This creates a very sharp rise in the electric potential, from your point and going up. Like a strong wind for your sail, this strong electrostatic gradient is lifting your thread of silk.
With these forces unrolling the silk from your spinnerets, it finally reaches the critical length, generating enough lift to compensate your weight. This means, little spider, that the air is yours to conquer! You fly away, to discover new horizons.
Mariano-Martins, P.; Lo-Man-Hung, N.; Torres, T. T. Evolution of Spiders and Silk Spinning: Mini Review of the Morphology, Evolution, and Development of Spiders’ Spinnerets. Front. Ecol. Evol. 2020, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2020.00109.
Morley, E. L.; Robert, D. Electric Fields Elicit Ballooning in Spiders. Current Biology 2018, 28 (14), 2324-2330.e2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.05.057.