Electric spiders! My latest on NatGeo

The "ballooning" or "parachuting" spiders known as Gossamer spiders fly on threads of silk, reaching heights of up to 2.5 miles up in the mountains. Find out how they use static electricity to get where they're going in How Do Spiders Fly? Mystery Solved on National Geographic.


My favorite thing about writing this story was that the study author included long quotes of Charles Darwin's accounts of his encounters with the spiders and his theories about how they worked. It was so exciting to read about how scientists today investigate theories of scientists past, especially the most famous naturalist of all.



These spinnerets that put out spider silk
have a charge, part of how ballooning
spiders fly

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