Arachnid Recollections

At five years old, I wanted to be an entomologist when I grew up. I loved going outside with my dad to look under rocks for pill bugs, centipedes, and other creepy crawlies—even spiders. Yet when I watched the animated Charlotte’s Web movie, I remember being disturbed by the ending when Joy, Aranea, and Nellie fly away. Maybe it was the goodbye that made me feel melancholy, or simply the strange idea of flying spiders that unnerved me.

Like some of the other faux flyers you read about on page 22,1 spiders don’t fly in the conventional sense. They take to the sky by ballooning. Spider babies float away to avoid being eaten by other newly hatched spiders in the nest. Adult spiders balloon in search of food, mates, and nesting places.

Before liftoff, spiders raise a leg or two into the air to test out atmospheric conditions. Their legs are covered in tiny sensory hairs that measure the wind and the current from earth’s electric field. If conditions are favorable, a spider creates a parachute by shooting thin strands of silk into the air. The strands are charged with a static electricity, which interacts with electricity in the air, sending the spider skyward. Ballooning spiders can drift as far as 1,000 miles.

Although I didn’t grow up to be an entomologist, on the Answers magazine team, I get to learn about all kinds of creatures in God’s creation—great and small, creepy and crawly.

This article is from Answers magazine, July–September, 2023, p. 71.