Expert Available: Flying, Venomous Spider Spotted in New England

The parachuting, venomous Joro spider was apparently spotted in a Boston, Massachusetts neighborhood, a reported sighting that may confirm these spiders appear to be moving north. According to USA Today, the invasive spiders were first spotted in Georgia ten years ago and they’ve spread across Georgia, South Carolina, North, Carolina and Tennessee, with reports of the spider in Alabama, Maryland, Oklahoma and West Virginia. The spider was just recently spotted in Pennsylvania earlier this month.

If you would like more context on this matter, please consider Gustavo Hormiga, the Ruth Weintraub Professor of Biology at the George Washington University. The research in the Hormiga laboratory focuses on the systematics and evolutionary biology of spiders, with emphasis on orbweavers and their close relatives (Orbiculariae). In his lab, they tackle questions that span from species level taxonomic problems, addressed using a monographic approach, to intra and interfamilial phylogenetic relationships. They have an active fieldwork program that has taken them around the world in search of our study organisms. The most recent fieldwork has been carried out in several countries of the Neotropical region, Madagascar and Equatorial Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

He can address questions about this species of spider and its viability in the winter months.

If you would like to speak with Prof. Hormiga, please contact GW Senior Media Relations Specialist Cate Douglass at [email protected].

-GW-