I witnessed this myself in my back yard this morning.
A small spider (perhaps the size of the plastic ball on a straight pin), yellow with lighter yellow striped abdomen, climbed up the side of a bottle of Tobasco Sauce. Once at the top, it ran around in narrowing circles until (I’m assuming) it was quite satasfied that he had reached the highest point on the bottle (it had). At that point he/she proceeded to rear up on his/her back four legs while extending his front four high in the air. It stayed that way for a just a moment, testing the breeze I believe. It then dropped back down, tensed up it’s legs, drew up it’s abdomen, and LAUNCHED itself across the whole of my back yard --twenty feet at least until I’d lost sight of it!
Is this some special breed of jumping spider? It seemed to float on the breeze a bit, do they extend their legs out in some way to glide about?
Usually they exude silk which catches the breeze and carries them about. Fine spider silk can be pretty hard to see unless the light hits it just right.
Squink pretty much hit it. I just wanted to say: This is called “ballooning”.
And Gary Larson had a really funny “The Far Side” about Buffalo ballooning.
The single strands of sider web that blow around in the morning is called “gossamer”.
Those spiderlings are pretty neat (I assume it’s a newborn). They climb to the top of the nearest highest object they can find and throw out silk filaments that catch the breeze. Under the right conditions, they can float for miles. This allows a group a new spiders to disperse over a wide area (sort of like dandelions) and be less likely to compete with each other
Does this mean (horror) that whenever I feel a spider strand drape itself across my face I have a spider on me somewhere?
I must know the answer to this even though an affirmative one may kill me (via an instantaneous coronary or brain aneurysm)