The Flight Of The Ballooning Spiders

In a behaviour called "ballooning" spiders  fly on the wind for hundreds of kilometers to search for a mate or find another place to colonize. Scientists have looked at ballooning before but a new study dissects how exactly the spiders take off from their point of origin.  Moonsung Cho and colleagues from the Technical University of Berlin put 14 large crab spiders (Xysticus) on a mushroom-shaped platform exposed to the natural breeze and, in a separate experiment, the researchers placed the spiders in a wind tunnel, where they could control wind speed and temperature.



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