"They have been found as high as 4.5 kilometres(almost 3 miles up) and are often among the first animals to reach new islands. Some species can also glide or windsurf."
Paragliding to beautiful islands. La Dolce Vita. What an untangled sail they spin. Spinnaker meisters. Perhaps they even like Jimmy Buffett's music. Now if we could only convince them to fight crime.
"Paragliding to beautiful islands. La Dolce Vita. What an untangled sail they spin. Spinnaker meisters."
Thanks Isamorph, for the beautiful images your eloquent words inspire. Watching clouds of recent hatchlings ballooning in Kruger National Park among the elephants is one of my favorite memories.
To imagine them paragliding to idyllic tropical islands just adds another wonderful dimension.
More on untangled webs. Itsy bitsy spiders with excellent pre-flight data. Trichobothria:now you're talking---sort of like when the hairs on the human body move in response to static electricity, but magnitudes more sensitive.
"The behavioral experiments demonstrate that spiders can detect e-fields, but what is the sensory basis of spider e-field detection? In bumblebees, mechanosensory hairs are the putative electroreceptors sensitive to e-fields [34]. Arachnids have mechanosensory hairs known as trichobothria (Figures 3A and 3B ). Much is known about their mechanical and neural response to medium flows (air and water) [35, 36]; they are exquisitely sensitive, detecting air motion close to thermal noise [37], they detect sound [38], and they are omnidirectional [39]. Early studies using electrostatic actuation as a tool to investigate trichobothria mechanics indicate that they may also be sensitive to e-fields.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)30693-6