As you know, many spiders are able to weave special "balloons" from the web so that they can fly from place to place with their help. Scientists have found that in this they are helped not only by the wind, but also by the electric fields generated by thunderstorms throughout the planet.
Spiders cannot fly, but many have learned to plan quite well. Scientists have long known that spiders weave special "balloons" to fly from place to place, but they missed something. It turned out that spiders are able to use electric fields of sufficient strength to send their improvised hang glider in flight even when it is calm around!
Erica Morley and Daniel Robert of the University of Bristol, UK, have been studying ways to move spiders through electricity since 2013. They focused their research on the electric potential gradient (EGF), a stable electric field orbiting the Earth. As the scientist Richard Feynman once remarked, "the earth is negatively charged, and the potential in the air is positive." The tension in the air is maintained by thunderstorms, since a thunderstorm is always raging somewhere on Earth. However, this tension is impermanent throughout the planet. On a cloudless day, it can rise up to 100 volts per meter, and in a thunderstorm, fly up to as much as 10 kilovolts per meter.
Morley and Robert decided to find out if these electric fields affect the "balloons" of spiders, and also to find out how exactly the difference in voltage will affect the spider flights. To do this, a group of spiders was placed on vertical strips of cardboard, imitating branches and stems of plants, in the center of a plastic table. As soon as the scientists applied a slight tension, the spiders began to climb to the tops of the stripes and take a special posture, protruding the abdominal segments. It looks very funny, but the spiders do not have fun - they stand up like this only if they are going to shoot the cobwebs. Some of them did indeed fly, even though there was no air movement in the laboratory. However, as soon as the tension disappeared, the spiders calmed down and the sensitive hairs on their body (the so-called trichobothria) settled down again.
Vasily Makarov