Meet the latest scary critter on its way to New York and New Jersey – what you need to know
Man, here comes the spider.
Experts predict the arrival of a massive, poisonous arachnid in the Tri-State area — and you won’t believe how they’re getting there.
The black and yellow Joro spiders, which can grow to be as large as eight inches wide, first arrived in the southern United States via shipping containers from East Asia.
The spindly-legged intruders are infamous for using their webs as parachutes, earning them the moniker “ballooning spider.”
After slowly spreading around the East Coast for several years, the creepy crawlies are now seen parachuting onto car roofs and hitching free rides up I-95.
“Right now, we’re seeing them dispersing into Maryland, so they should be in New Jersey and New York soon enough, possibly even next year,” José R. Ramrez-Garofalo, an ecologist at Rutgers University’s Lockwood Lab, told Staten Island Advance.
“It is a matter of when, not if.”
Clemson researchers stated that the spider, which is presently “spreading like wildfire” in the Southeast, will consume almost anything that gets caught in their web.
However, there is some good news: uninvited intruders are significantly more likely to be located on a home’s exterior than inside.
There’s no reason to panic wherever you see them.
“Pesticides work [to kill them], but, also, they are probably overkill because it will kill everything else, and there is a cost involved; it’s just as easy to physically move them if they are on your house,” said professor David Coyle, the study’s lead author.
“They seem to love structures. So, I just tell people to take a stick or broom and remove them.”
The best news of all is that the Joro’s venom cannot injure humans because their fangs are too small to enter human tissue.
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