They look like something straight out of a horror movie—giant spiders with legs stretching as wide as your hand—and now they’re being spotted across Southern California.
The culprit is an invasive Joro spider, which is a brightly colored species from East Asia that’s quietly weaving its way into the Golden State.
According to recent sightings, these eight-legged invaders are no longer just a Georgia problem—the first US state they were spotted in back in 2014.
Experts believe the Joros likely hitched a ride to the US in shipping containers.
The spider, known as Trichonephila clavata, is hard to miss. Fully grown females can stretch to 1.25 inches long, with eye-catching yellow bodies streaked in blue-green across their backs and splashed with red and yellow underneath. Their long, spindly legs are typically black with bold yellow bands.
By comparison, adult males are easier to miss. They’re a quarter-inch long, with slim brown bodies marked by faint yellowish stripes and a darker line running down the middle.
Their upper body is light brown with darker striping, giving them a more muted, less flashy appearance.
But it’s not just their looks that are chilling–it’s how they travel. These spiders use a technique as babies called “ballooning,” where they launch silk threads into the wind and sail through the air like tiny paratroopers.
While they can’t actually fly, they can drift for miles, landing wherever the breeze takes them—which, lately, is apparently Santa Barbara County.
But it’s their reproduction that’s really jaw-dropping. Come mid-October through November, females lay egg sacs packed with a whopping 400 to 500 eggs.
These sacs—made of thick, white silk—cling to just about anything: leaves, tree bark, even buildings, meaning they can pop up virtually anywhere.
“They’re great big bugs, but they’re not going to bite you and cause terrible damage,” Pat Wooden, the insect identification lab manager at Virginia Tech, told the LA Times.
Joro fangs are too small to even break human skin, and they are famously shy—reportedly “playing dead” for over an hour if they feel threatened.
While their webs can get up to 10 feet in size, they have an appetite for things people hate. The Joro is known to gobble up mosquitoes, flies, and even the invasive brown marmorated stink bug.
Still, for Californians used to palm trees and sunshine, the sight of a palm-sized yellow spider dangling from a golden web is frightening.
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