The sky.
Yep.
According to Andy Davis, a researcher at Georgia’s Odum School of Ecology, the invasive species from Japan that likely made it to North America hitching a ride on shipping containers, is likely to start colonizing the entire East Coast of the United States this spring by, and I quote, “parachuting down from the sky.”
I recently polled our writers who live in Georgia, or who have spent considerable time in Georgia, and after lamenting that Georgia continues to be America’s Australia, they informed me that the Joros aren’t particularly special and shouldn’t incite a mass hysteria in the Northeast. That they’re one of a thousand spiders that you should avoid, but they’re not a threat to humans and can mostly be avoided.
In retort, I showed them these images:
…and reiterated that they PARACHUTE DOWN FROM THE SKY. (Which might make for a pretty cool Disney movie about the migration of a few easygoing spider friends on the wind from the Mid Atlantic to New England to live among the meanest spiders on earth, who will knock you out for looking at their Dunkin Donuts coffee wrong.)
Yes, they admitted, the parachuting thing is macabre in theory but they’d never seen it first hand.
I’ll report back later this spring, rating the success of the migration by the number of terrified screams I hear from my skyward-looking eight-year-old by May.
