Invasive, palm-size spiders are surprisingly tolerant of urban areas: Study

Jorō spiders have spread across some U.S. states in the last decade, and a new study suggests their higher tolerance for urban settings could explain why.

In a new study, published Feb. 13 in the journal Arthropoda, researchers found that these massive, invasive spiders were surprisingly tolerant of vibrations that simulated busy traffic. Many animals tend to avoid busy roads and urban areas because the heightened vibrations can induce stress.

In more than 350 trials, examining these spiders across 20 different roads, the researchers found that the vibrations from busy streets had only a small negative effect on the spiders’ tendency to capture prey — that spiders in busier areas were slightly less likely to attack their prey.

Those spiders, however, did not decline in weight or health — suggesting the spiders found ways to compensate for the slightly lower prey capture in these urban areas.

“If you’re a spider, you rely on vibrations to do your job and catch bugs,” said Andy Davis, corresponding author of the study and a research scientist in University of Georgia’s Odum School of Ecology. “But these Joro webs are everywhere in the fall, including right next to busy roads, and the spiders seem to be able to make a living there. For some reason, these spiders seem urban tolerant.”

The spider was first spotted in the U.S. about a decade ago, according to the university, and has successfully spread across many states, including Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee, according to Live Science, which reported sightings also in Alabama, Maryland, Oklahoma and West Virginia.

Many scientists expect the spider to continue to spread across the East Coast in the future — a hypothesis supported by this study.

“It looks like Joro spiders are not going to shy away from building a web under a stoplight or an area where you wouldn’t imagine a spider to be,” study co-author Alexa Schultz said in a statement. “I don’t know how happy people are going to be about it, but I think the spiders are here to stay.”

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