If you ever needed a reason to take better care of the planet, we can’t think of a better one than not pissing off spiders. Unfortunately, a research team in North America seems to have found out that it’s exactly what’s happening.
In a new study of colonies of communal spiders, it has been found that the arachnids can be impacted into a PTSD-like state by erratic weather. The new phenomenon is called “cyclone-induced disturbance.”
Researchers studied 211 different communal spider sites before and after hurricane impacts and harassing the spiders’ webs with things like electric toothbrushes and pieces of paper (it kind of sounds like the researchers may have just been pissing off the spiders themselves!).
The study claims that after the meteorological events, the spiders were not having any of that crap and became more aggressive than before they had survived torrential rains and gale-force winds. It was also noted that, after hurricanes, the spiders would produce extra egg sacs and have more babies to assure their colonies survived.
Along with the stress of the weather events and pooping out thousands of extra spider babies, it is believed that the storms cause food shortages, which go a long way to explain why they would be so aggressive. After all, they’ve got like a million extra mouths to feed.
In the end, the claim is that more bad weather = more stress on the spiders, which in turn means more aggressive spiders. From our perspective, we are trying to figure out why a group of scientists needed to perform a study to find out that spiders don’t like to go through hurricanes or have weird giants jam electric toothbrushes into their homes.
Source: Inhabatitat