Oh boy, here come the hysterical headlines

On LiveScience:

On MSN:

On Philadelphia TV news:

These are all nonsense. Virtually all spiders are venomous, and the Joro spider does not have particularly strong venom and isn’t a hazard to humans. The “flying” bit is just a reference to the spiderlings’ dispersal method of using strands of silk to loft themselves into the air — the adults are much too large and heavy to do that.

At least NPR gets the story straight.

That is correct: harmless. Harmless to people, at least — there is concern that the Joro spider will displace other resident spider species.

But these are magnificent animals.

What’s also annoying to me is that we already have large orb-weaving spiders of similar size living in these same places that the Joro is invading. We have Argiope aurantia already.

These tend not to live in cities or places particularly close to people — they eat large insects, like grasshoppers. If your home is swarming with hoppers all over, then yes, maybe Argiope or Joro will set up shop in your neighborhood, and take out the grasshoppers. I’ve seen fallow fields around my home that are densely overgrown with grasses and where the grasshoppers are leaping all around you as you walk through the brush, and I’ll see Argiope spiders populating every square meter. They don’t get headlines, though, because they’re harmless and leave people alone.

Maybe I’ll have to record a video of one of these spectacularly dense Argiope sites this year — they usually start popping up in August, so you’ll have to wait a bit.