I was one of the first people to report them spreading back almost 4(edit) years ago. One day I was taking in groceries and I noticed a golden glimmer by my front door between 3 trees I have. I took a closer look and I realized it was a massive 6-10 foot web, that had 3-4 layers of web spread between the trees. Right smack in the center of it was this beautiful 3 inch spider that was amazing looking. Right below her was this tiny male spider that was barely 1/8 her size. I immediately looked her up and spotted an article about how they came to be and to report their sightings. I emailed the UGA professor about this and he was surprised to see they had already came this far in.
Almost 4(edit) years later, when you go outside on a misty morning during the summer, you look up into the trees as you drive home and it is literally nothing but glimmering Joro spider webs. Thousands of them.
Most of them now appear in my back yard as I removed those trees, but it was crazy to see peoples faces when they walked to my front door and realized what they were walking past and freaked out at a 3 inch spider about 5 foot away from them.
edit: when I looked up the UGA professor name I realized I emailed it back in September 2018! Crazy.
I remember how fascinated I was by them when I first visited Japan. Public parks there have been full of them for a long time, it seems like they like a lot the way human gardening is arranging trees, i.e. their wide nets work perfectly there. I don‘t see the problem either - if you want less mosquitoes and flies here you have a pretty good solution.
This is how I feel. I love that they get the pest bugs. I don't mind them at all. I learn where their webs are by running into them one time and then going around them the next times.
Unless there are other giant yellow spiders with black legs and big webs native to Georgia, I'm almost certain I spotted these when jogging by my neighbor's house in North Georgia around 2007. It was terrifying looking, and it stuck with me.
It had to be around that time, because I moved shortly thereafter.
Anecdotal, but when I saw this headline I immediately thought back upon it.
There are some other yellow spiders, but nothing really compares to this one. They don't make traditional webs. They make massive ugly janky looking webs from all different directions that span across a lot of different branches. I don't think they came to be until about 3 years ago. The UGA professor says that they believe they came from a freight truck traveling up I85 as they hatched off.
Man, these things are annoying. I think I live in an area where they really started taking off, because I've seen them the last two or three summers. It seems like they are more and more every year. They make huge webs (like up to 6 ft huge, with single webs going out even further) right at or above eye level and then just sit in the middle of them. When hiking or biking trails you have to constantly keep an eye out for them or you'll constantly be walking into them.
I pruned trees in Kununurra, Northern Australia, and there was a spider in each tree we’d cut (500/day). Harmless or not, they tend to climb once they’re on you, so those of us who are afraid of spiders would just let them climb and shook our hats while proceeding to the next tree. Yes, climb across the face. The leader didn’t bother, so spiders would fight on his hat.
Awesome experience, but a few people harmed during the summer, mostly because of the tools (and one by bees, one by green caterpillars, one by dehydration after going to work by 40°C after a night drinking - so basically all their faults as long as you value yourself). Said boss had prison experience. I tend to believe Gen Y misses the year of military service and tend to replace it with similar experiences, and the gap year in Australia is toughening for the office monkey and the nerds we were. 100% would do it again.
Sounds reminiscent of banana spiders here in Florida -- aka golden orb weaver or golden silk spider. They do the same thing with their webs, which can also be hard to see due to the coloring. (The "golden" is due to the silk's yellow color, not the spider's.)
"The study found that despite their similarities, the Joro spider has about double the metabolism of its relative, has a 77% higher heart rate and can survive a brief freeze that kills off many of its cousins. These findings mean the Joro spider’s body functions better than its relative in a cold environment.
And that means the Joros can likely exist beyond the borders of the Southeast."
Your description helped me realize these are the spiders I was constantly dodging on trails outside of Puerto Vallarta last year! The webs were usually over my head on the trails, but I imagine that's only because of trail usage.
Those might have been banana spiders / golden orb weavers, which are native to the southeast US down to northern South America. They have the same web-building habit as described.
I know this article and the comments are pretty light about this, but I really do wonder what they eat and what we're eventually going to hear about being muscled out of the local ecosystems as a result of their success. At least their introduction wasn't intentional, which tbh is kind of scary in itself.
All I could find is that we know they eat brown marmorated stink bugs[0].
"Joro spiders also appear to be able to capture and feed on at least one insect that other local spiders are not: adult brown marmorated stink bugs, an invasive pest that can infest houses and damage crops."
There is some good news there. From an article posted in a different comment: "Joros don’t appear to have much of an effect on local food webs or ecosystems, said Andy Davis, corresponding author of the study and a research scientist in the Odum School of Ecology. They may even serve as an additional food source for native predators like birds." [0]
Here in GA, there are already multiple types of orb weaver and these are in the same niche with one exception: they will also eat stink bugs. There are also many birds who eat the orb weavers and will also eat the Joros. They basically slide right in without too much serious impact.
The whole article is a bit tongue-in-cheek, with it's references to "terrifying" even though it also says they're harmless. And the end, where he says to build a dome over GA now before it's too late, etc. I laughed out loud a little at that last bit.
So I think the plague reference was meant as another way to exaggerate the severity of the situation for humorous effect. That was my take anyway.
The whole article is a bit tongue-in-cheek, with it's references to "terrifying" even though it also says they're harmless
A spider the size of the palm of your hand sounds pretty terrifying to me no matter how harmless it is, but then I really don't like spiders of any size.
They're trying to make it sound terrifying in a fun way (I think, maybe sarcastic). It's under a heading of "Other terrifying things to know about the Joro spider" along with a bunch of other facts that are not at all terrifying.
By far the most successful invasive arthropod in the Nearctic is the European honeybee, but you never really hear anyone talk about the considerable ecological harm those do, for the obvious reason that their agricultural and thus economic utility is considered far to outweigh the externalities of their cultivation.
No one has proven that they got all the 2021 murder hornets yet either, so expect more good news on the horizon. I fully expect to see a murder hornet fly by battling a Joro spider trying to web it up this spring.
Not sure why the article describes these as harmless? If one of them parachutes down on to my face, I'm sure I'll die of a heart attack - hopefully a quick death.
Oh man, you aren't alone. This is nightmare fuel. I would move away from the area guaranteed just to escape the possibility. As far as I know, my only fear is spiders and it makes up for being blasé about almost everything else. I still check my room before I get into bed because 2 years ago a House Spider (about the size of a pint glass hole) was on the headboard as I was minding my own business in bed. Not too long ago I had a nightmare about that. Never mind it's parachuting yellow brothers from the sky being a thing. No way.
Only young juveniles balloon; on the one hand it's how they disperse from their natal web, and on the other only a very tiny spider is light enough to balloon at all. You probably wouldn't even notice if one landed on you.
In any case, they're a lot more scared of us, and fairly so - imagine Cthulhu peering into your bedroom window, and you've got a fair picture of what it's like to be a spider who's suffered the mishap of somehow attracting human attention.
I think I read somewhere that they have a tendency to leap onto objects passing underneath them that are several thousand times their mass and try to spread throughout the land.
Worth mentioning is that it is very young spiderlings, not adults, who engage in "ballooning" to disperse from their natal web.
You don't need to worry about giant spiders with four-inch legspans falling on your head! Or not more than usually, at least - the spiders drifting out of the sky will be only at most perhaps the size of a matchhead, and even more harmless than they would be when full-sized.
Readit News
Almost 4(edit) years later, when you go outside on a misty morning during the summer, you look up into the trees as you drive home and it is literally nothing but glimmering Joro spider webs. Thousands of them.
Most of them now appear in my back yard as I removed those trees, but it was crazy to see peoples faces when they walked to my front door and realized what they were walking past and freaked out at a 3 inch spider about 5 foot away from them.
edit: when I looked up the UGA professor name I realized I emailed it back in September 2018! Crazy.
entomology from the greek ἔντομον for "insect", the tom actually is the same tom in atom.
It had to be around that time, because I moved shortly thereafter.
Anecdotal, but when I saw this headline I immediately thought back upon it.
Here's one from 2006 in Central Florida: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bobisbob/299200141/in/datepost...
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Edit: There's a pretty good example picture of the webs in the UGA article mentioned by the main article: https://news.uga.edu/joro-spiders-likely-to-spread-beyond-ge...
I know now from the article that they're harmless, but as a mild arachnophobe the experience was highly unpleasant.
Awesome experience, but a few people harmed during the summer, mostly because of the tools (and one by bees, one by green caterpillars, one by dehydration after going to work by 40°C after a night drinking - so basically all their faults as long as you value yourself). Said boss had prison experience. I tend to believe Gen Y misses the year of military service and tend to replace it with similar experiences, and the gap year in Australia is toughening for the office monkey and the nerds we were. 100% would do it again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichonephila_clavipes
https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/in467
"The study found that despite their similarities, the Joro spider has about double the metabolism of its relative, has a 77% higher heart rate and can survive a brief freeze that kills off many of its cousins. These findings mean the Joro spider’s body functions better than its relative in a cold environment.
And that means the Joros can likely exist beyond the borders of the Southeast."
My least favorite Florida spider is also nonvenomous but I used to get bitten by the spiny orb weaver any time I was near a citrus tree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichonephila_clavipes
https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/in467
Globalism: it's for spiders, too.
"Joro spiders also appear to be able to capture and feed on at least one insect that other local spiders are not: adult brown marmorated stink bugs, an invasive pest that can infest houses and damage crops."
[0] https://news.uga.edu/joro-spiders-are-here-to-stay/
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[0] https://news.uga.edu/joro-spiders-likely-to-spread-beyond-ge...
Seems like an odd choice to compare a spider and the Bubonic plague. Wouldn't any number of invasive species have been better?
So I think the plague reference was meant as another way to exaggerate the severity of the situation for humorous effect. That was my take anyway.
A spider the size of the palm of your hand sounds pretty terrifying to me no matter how harmless it is, but then I really don't like spiders of any size.
By far the most successful invasive arthropod in the Nearctic is the European honeybee, but you never really hear anyone talk about the considerable ecological harm those do, for the obvious reason that their agricultural and thus economic utility is considered far to outweigh the externalities of their cultivation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9zxNLU-ei0
(the spider lost this round, apparently)
Deleted Comment
In any case, they're a lot more scared of us, and fairly so - imagine Cthulhu peering into your bedroom window, and you've got a fair picture of what it's like to be a spider who's suffered the mishap of somehow attracting human attention.
"* They are bright yellow, black, blue, and red and can grow up to 3 inches.
* They likely traveled across the globe on shipping containers, similar to the Bubonic plague.
* Their life cycle begins in early spring, but they get big in June and are often seen in July and August.
* They're named for Jorōgumo, a creature of Japanese folklore that can shapeshift into a woman or spider before killing its prey."
Emphasis added.
You don't need to worry about giant spiders with four-inch legspans falling on your head! Or not more than usually, at least - the spiders drifting out of the sky will be only at most perhaps the size of a matchhead, and even more harmless than they would be when full-sized.