Houston Texas Flying Spiders: What Are They & Should You Be Concerned?
Flying spiders, or ballooning spiders, take to the air to move from one place to another. They are called flying spiders, but no spider actually flies. Here is what you are seeing, why it happens, and whether it is anything to worry about.
Not flying. Ballooning.
Using a tactic called ballooning, spiderlings release silk into the air, let the wind catch it, and ride it to a new location. On a warm late-spring or early-fall morning you may see dozens of them drifting across a yard on strands of silk, or find the strands themselves draped over lawns, fences, and cars. That is what most people mean when they describe flying spiders around Houston.
The behavior is most often reported in North Texas and the Hill Country, but it happens around Houston too. Any open area with grass, a little wind, and a spider population will see it. Almost every spider family does it to some degree, so the spider you see floating past is most likely a hatchling of a common species that poses no risk to you, rather than anything new to the area.
Where all those spiderlings come from
Spiders lay a lot of eggs at once, often hundreds in a single sac. The eggs usually hatch in two to three weeks, depending on the species and the season. The hatchlings stay inside the egg sac until they have gone through their first molt, and then stay close to the nesting area for days or weeks after that.
Then they disperse. Dozens or hundreds of hungry siblings packed into a small space is a problem for all of them: there is not enough food, and spiderlings will eat each other when they are crowded. Hunger and the risk of being eaten push them to leave, and ballooning is how they make that first trip away from their birthplace. Moving away from the parents and the nest is how the species spreads.
Some adult spiders balloon as well. Small orb weavers and money spiders do it to find new hunting ground or mates. Larger adults are generally too heavy to be lifted, so the spiders you see in the air are nearly always small ones.
If you see a flying spider in your yard, there is no reason to be alarmed. These are tiny arachnids looking for somewhere to build a web, and they pose no threat.
How a spider gets airborne
Ballooning, also called kiting, is a way for a spider to hitch a ride on its own silk and let the air carry it. Both newly hatched and adult spiders are capable of it, but spiderlings do it most.
Climb to an exposed point
A spiderling walks to the highest exposed spot it can reach: the tip of a blade of grass, a fence post, a branch, the top rail of a deck. It needs open air above it and at least a light breeze.
Tiptoe and point the abdomen up
The spider raises itself on the tips of its legs and tilts its abdomen toward the sky. Researchers call this posture tiptoeing, and it is the one clear sign that a spider is about to balloon rather than drop a dragline.
Release the silk
It then lets out one or several very fine strands of silk. Wind catches the strands, and research published in recent years suggests the atmosphere's own electric field helps lift them too, which is why spiders can balloon on days with almost no breeze.
Let go
Once the drag on the silk is enough to lift it, the spider releases its grip and floats away. It can trail the silk and steer a little, but mostly it goes where the air takes it, which may be the next yard over or a long way further.
The distances involved can be remarkable. Ballooning spiders have been collected by aircraft thousands of feet up and have landed on ships far out at sea; Charles Darwin recorded them coming aboard the Beagle well off the coast of South America. A spider that lands on water can stand on the surface, raise its legs as sails, and keep going. For the species, ballooning is a survival strategy: it is how spiders reach new habitats, recolonize ground after a flood or fire, and spread across regions.
The silk you find draped across a lawn or a fence line on a still morning, sometimes called gossamer, is the aftermath of a mass ballooning event. It is only silk and disappears with the first rain.
What about the flying spiders in the news?
In the last few years the phrase "flying spiders" has also attached itself to the Joro spider, a large yellow-and-black orb weaver from East Asia that became established in Georgia and has been spreading through the Southeast. Headlines about giant flying spiders refer to this species, because its spiderlings balloon in spring the same way native spiders do. The adults, which can span a hand with legs extended, do not fly or balloon.
Two things are worth knowing. First, the Joro spider is not an established Texas species, so a spider drifting across a Houston yard is a native one. Second, where the Joro does live, it is considered a nuisance rather than a danger: it is shy, and its bite is of little medical concern. If a very large yellow and black orb weaver shows up in a Houston garden, it is almost certainly the native yellow garden spider, which is not a medical concern either and has been here all along.
Should you be concerned?
No. The sight of a spider makes many people shudder, but spiders are a useful part of the yard. They eat mosquitoes, flies, and the other insects you would rather not have, and a ballooning spiderling is a few millimetres long and cannot hurt you. There is no reason to fear flying spiders.
The spiders worth taking seriously in Texas are the ones you do not see drifting on silk. The brown recluse and the black widow are the two medically significant species here, and both are secretive ground and crevice dwellers that bite people only by accident, when a hand goes into a woodpile or a shoe or a box in the garage. Our guide to Texas spiders covers how to tell those two apart from the wolf spiders and house spiders they are often mistaken for, whose bites are not dangerous to people.
Where ballooning matters to a homeowner is numbers. A mass dispersal can put a lot of spiderlings onto a house at once, and the ones that find eaves, window frames, and porch lights will build webs there. If webs keep coming back around the exterior, a general pest service that treats the perimeter and knocks down webbing on each visit keeps the population low without you having to do anything about the spiders yourself. Our Houston pest control plans include spiders along with the other common exterior pests.
Spiders on the house are a sign of what they are eating
A heavy spider population around the exterior usually means a heavy insect population feeding it. Our technicians treat the perimeter, remove webbing, and look for the recluse and widow harborage you want gone.
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