What’s venomous, invasive and neon yellow? Meet this spider spreading across Eastern US

Rick Hoebeke said he got a strange call in 2014 when a person asked him to come and take look at a bizarre spider.

The Georgia Museum of Natural History collection manager had no idea the species would soon make a name for itself in his home state and beyond.

The Joro spider is the newest invasive species of spider in the eastern part of the U.S., with experts anticipating they will continue to spread throughout the region, National Geographic reported.

The spider —an intimidating medley of neon yellow, red and teal highlights — is as big as your palm, according to a news release from the University of Georgia.

That’s enough to make any arachnophobe’s skin crawl, but the spindly creature might offer some environmental benefits, too.

Swimming in silk

Hoebeke’s encounter with the Joro spider in 2014 inspired a project to identify the strange species and track where it came from in the first place, UGA reported.

It was discovered the spider is from East Asia, Hoebeke said, and may have been brought to the states in a shipping container that was dropped off along Interstate 85 in Georgia.

Ever since it was dropped off, Hoebeke says the population has started to boom, spurring hundreds of emails from people on how to exterminate them.

One of the most intimidating features of the Joro spider is its webs.

One UGA entomologist has had a perfect research opportunity for the spiders in his very backyard in Winterville. Will Hudson has to brave massive Joro spider webs out front of his home, which are plastered across his porch ten feet deep.

“Last year, there were dozens of spiders, and they began to be something of a nuisance when I was doing yard work,” Hudson told UGA. “This year, I have several hundred, and they actually make the place look spooky with all the messy webs — like a scene out of ‘Arachnophobia.’”

Hudson enjoys the beauty of the spiders, but has to push back on the swelling population at his home by stepping on them, raking up their webs and spraying aerosol product on them.

“I know. They are gorgeous spiders,” he told UGA with a chuckle. “But there are just too damn many of them.”

The Joro spider’s fangs are so small they might not even manage to break human skin, according to National Geographic, meaning they aren’t considered much of a threat to humans. Scientists haven’t seen any impacts to native wildlife as a result of the spider.

But amid the thick webs and unrelenting tide of Joro spiders in Georgia, there may be a silver lining, UGA entomologist Nancy Hinkle said.

Pests — or pest control?

Hinkle said that the new local could offer good pest control against different bugs that interfere with people’s lives and the environment.

“Joro spiders present us with excellent opportunities to suppress pests naturally, without chemicals, so I’m trying to convince people that having zillions of large spiders and their webs around is a good thing!” she told UGA.

One of the bugs that UGA hopes the Joro spiders can help limit is stink bugs, which are detrimental to crops.

The spiders should be fairly easy to avoid, Hinkle said, as long as hundreds don’t set up camp on your front porch.

If the creatures are giving residents a headache, the swaths of webs and spiders inside them will fall away in November as the population dies. Before the female spiders die in the fall, they will leave behind a sac of eggs, Hinkle said. The eggs will drift in the air with silk parachutes, spreading across the eastern part of the U.S.

Sightings of the Joro spider have been reported in Georgia around Atlanta and Athens, along with parts of Tennessee and the Western Carolinas, according to Al.com.

Hudson told UGA that citizens would be best off learning how to coexist with the creatures and finding ways to manage their population. He suggests identifying females to eradicate in order to limit egg production.

For more information about the new eight-legged neighbors, the Department of Entomology in the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences offers insight into the Joro spider invasion.

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