Welcome to Natural Wonders, a place where we dig into what’s amazing about hummingbirds and why waterfalls are good for your health and so many other weird and wonderful aspects of the natural world!
With regard to the spider webs, an interesting hypothesis, but it seems you may be confounding wire spacing with presence of current. From your images, it is clear that the space between the top wire and the middle is larger than the middle to bottom. You can do the experiment to decide between these hypotheses---- for the current idea, all you need to do is turn the power off for a couple of months (smile). For testing the spacing, all you have to do is move that top wire down to make the spacing the same (smile, again). Or you could look for lines with equal spacing, but that would be less fun.
The equivalent spider in Florida is the golden silk spider, a really beautiful, impressive spider. You refer to the webs of the Joro as "he", but in fact, males of both the Joro and the golden silk spider are very small and occupy auxiliary webs near the female web. From there, males try to sneak in to mate the female without getting eaten. Risky business...
I see your point - as a strict experiment, the variable of wire spacing is not exactly equal. However, as you point out, it's pretty difficult to create scientific conditions without a laboratory. I could be convinced the spacing might have an effect if I hadn't already seen much larger webs built by these spiders -- last year, we had one golden strand that stretched from a tree limb to a weed on the ground, about 8-10 feet, that lasted well into the cold weather before it fell. This year, most of the spiders have passed on, but next fall I will look for evenly spaced wires to see if the theory holds! As for the sex of the spiders - I caught that after I'd published -- the video referred to her as "she" but the issue text said "he" and I should have known better, because when I tried to kill Joros the first year they appeared, I noticed the small males oftentimes sitting to the side of the web. Thanks for your thoughtful response!
So glad you like it! If you have any questions you wonder about natural phenomena, shoot them my way - I'm always looking for new things to wonder about!
I'm signed in, yay! The tiny claws are amazing! I love this electrifying story, lol. The static charges are fascinating and I agree there's something up with them avoiding those top lines! I've never noticed before! Now I want to re-read about the Jori spiders.
That close-up picture of their tiny claws and their "fur" actually made a spider's leg look sort of cute. Which is not something I thought I'd say about spiders. Glad you liked it!
With regard to the spider webs, an interesting hypothesis, but it seems you may be confounding wire spacing with presence of current. From your images, it is clear that the space between the top wire and the middle is larger than the middle to bottom. You can do the experiment to decide between these hypotheses---- for the current idea, all you need to do is turn the power off for a couple of months (smile). For testing the spacing, all you have to do is move that top wire down to make the spacing the same (smile, again). Or you could look for lines with equal spacing, but that would be less fun.
The equivalent spider in Florida is the golden silk spider, a really beautiful, impressive spider. You refer to the webs of the Joro as "he", but in fact, males of both the Joro and the golden silk spider are very small and occupy auxiliary webs near the female web. From there, males try to sneak in to mate the female without getting eaten. Risky business...
I see your point - as a strict experiment, the variable of wire spacing is not exactly equal. However, as you point out, it's pretty difficult to create scientific conditions without a laboratory. I could be convinced the spacing might have an effect if I hadn't already seen much larger webs built by these spiders -- last year, we had one golden strand that stretched from a tree limb to a weed on the ground, about 8-10 feet, that lasted well into the cold weather before it fell. This year, most of the spiders have passed on, but next fall I will look for evenly spaced wires to see if the theory holds! As for the sex of the spiders - I caught that after I'd published -- the video referred to her as "she" but the issue text said "he" and I should have known better, because when I tried to kill Joros the first year they appeared, I noticed the small males oftentimes sitting to the side of the web. Thanks for your thoughtful response!
Wow, this is very fascinating! Thank you for sharing and this is a subscribe for me!
So glad you like it! If you have any questions you wonder about natural phenomena, shoot them my way - I'm always looking for new things to wonder about!
I'm signed in, yay! The tiny claws are amazing! I love this electrifying story, lol. The static charges are fascinating and I agree there's something up with them avoiding those top lines! I've never noticed before! Now I want to re-read about the Jori spiders.
That close-up picture of their tiny claws and their "fur" actually made a spider's leg look sort of cute. Which is not something I thought I'd say about spiders. Glad you liked it!