What Is The Holy Grail...? Sounds Intriguing.

[Ninurta]

I don't know if this a fluff-piece or not, but if true, it does have a vague connection to what we were discussing.

Spiders fly hundreds of miles using Earth's electric field, study finds.

'Young naturalist Charles Darwin was fascinated by the spiders that landed on HMS Beagle in October 1832 as
the ship headed for Buenos Aries. He concluded that the creatures must have floated over from the Argentinian
mainland. 

Since then scientists have marvelled how spiders get airborne, with some believing spiders’ silk thread catches in the wind.
Others believed the strands became electrostatically charged –allowing the spiders to ride Earth’s natural electric fields.



Now scientists, Erica Morley and Daniel Robert at Bristol University have conducted the first tests on whether electrostatic
forces are used in what has been nicknamed spider “ballooning”. And they have concluded the creatures can fly on electric
fields.

To take flight, a spider typically climbs to the top of a plant, tiptoes around, points its abdomen in the air and rapidly ejects
up to a metre of silk. University researchers were able to showed that spiders can detect electric fields in a lab experiment,
the Atlantic reported.

They did this by putting the arachnids on vertical strips of cardboard in the centre of a plastic box.
Next electric fields were generated between the floor and ceiling of similar strengths to what the spiders would experience
outdoors.

These fields ruffled tiny sensory hairs on the spiders’ feet –"like when you rub a balloon and hold it up to your hairs,” Miss Morley
explained. The spiders then performed a set of movements called tiptoeing –standing on the ends of their legs and poking their
abdomens in the air. 

Despite being in closed boxes with no airflow some of the arachnids even managed to take off.
And when Miss Morley turned off the electric fields inside the boxes, they dropped.

Peter Gorham, a physicist, showed that spiders propelling themselves on silk as a result of a magnetic field was mathematically
possible in 2013. He praised the scientist's work, saying: “As a physicist, it seemed very clear to me that electric fields played a
central role, but I could only speculate on how the biology might support this.
Morley and Robert have taken this to a level of certainty that far exceeds any expectations I had.”...'

SOURCE:

It's true - or at least the flying spiders part is.

About 17 or 18 years ago, I was standing guard duty in Greensboro, NC. Now there is not a lot to do under such circumstances but watch, which is what you are being paid to do, anyhow. So I watched. I watched up and down, all around, I tried to watch everywhere at once, as is my habit. A wee bit after noon, not long after the sun crossed the zenith heading west, I noticed the sky shimmering. "Well here's a curiosity" I thought to myself, so I watched the shimmer harder. There were threads in the sky causing the shimmering. As the wind blew them along and twisted them, the sun glinted off of them and then they'd disappear again until the sun got the right angle on them once more.

There were literally thousands of these shimmering threads in the sky twisting in and out of the sun's glint.... and it went on for hours.

They weren't very high, maybe running between 50 and 500 feet up - or maybe I just couldn't see the ones that were higher than that. Those threads were spider silk, and I mean to tell you there was a blue million of them! The wind was blowing them from the west, and the sun was heading towards the west, and the combination of those two angles allowed me to see the spider silk threads, each with a tiny spider hanging from it. I left that post at about 5:30 in the evening, and they were still going strong at that time. the next day, they were all gone. Eastward, I presume.

I don't know what caused it, nor do I know why spiders fly, but they did and do, and I've seen it.

End of story. It kind of creeps me out - it ain't enough that spiders sneak and creep along, now I know the bastards can fly, too!

.