What is shy, has eight legs and eats spotted lanternflies?

Good morning. It is Wednesday. We will meet a spider that experts expect will arrive in New York – the question is when. We also get details about a court ruling that will clear the way for Democrats to redraw the map of the state’s congressional districts.

The Joro spider is unusually large, about the size of a Post-it note. It moves through life on long, tentacle-like legs. It’s horrifying if you don’t like spiders.

And it’s “only a matter of time” before Joro spiders make their way to New York, says Andy Davis, a research scientist at the University of Georgia.

But there may be an upside to the imminent arrival of the joro, originally from Asia. It eats spotted lanternflies, the invasive pest that officials say New Yorkers must kill on the spot.

Joro spiders were first seen in the United States about a decade ago, in Georgia. They have since spread to Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, and sightings have also been reported in Maryland and West Virginia. according to iNaturalist, an online network of people who share information about nature. Davis said it made sense for the spiders to move north because the Mid-Atlantic region is at about the same latitude as places in Asia where they are widespread.

And, he said, “New York is right in the middle of where they like to be.”

The authors of a recent scientific article came to essentially the same conclusion after applying advanced modeling techniques to predict where Joros would go. One of the authors, David Coyle, an assistant professor at Clemson University, said the research suggested that places like New York “have greater habitat suitability.”

Not only that, “they seem to be okay with living in a city,” Davis said, adding that he has seen joro spiders on streetlights and telephone poles in Georgia. “These are places where regular spiders wouldn’t be caught dead,” he said.

Interest in joros in New York was revived last week SILive.com quoted José Ramírez-Garofalo, an ecologist and Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University, and said that “they should be in New Jersey and New York soon enough, possibly even next year.”

“It’s a matter of when, not if,” he said. (He told me that joros “seem to be expanding their range.” But he also said that “this won’t be like a spotted lanternfly-like thing, where there are millions and millions of them feeding on our trees.”)

Coyle told me that exactly when Joros would arrive is “the million dollar question.”

Davis had said in the spring that he suspected they would be sighted somewhere in the state in the summer.

There were not. But Davis told me they could arrive next year. Joros is “very good at lifting cars and trucks,” he said, adding that he was driving to work about a month ago when he saw one hanging from his passenger side mirror.

Coyle also talked about how joros can clip onto vehicles. “One person visiting grandma from Georgia could bring the stuff to New York,” he said.

On their own, joros can spread by ‘ballooning’ or moving through the air by shooting a string that catches the wind. Air currents carry them away, but not far. “If we waited for them to get there on their own,” Davis said, referring to New York, “it would take 20 years.”

Coyle noted that joro spiders are invasive. He said he did not subscribe to the idea that joro spiders would be beneficial because they ate other invasive species, such as the spotted lanternfly. “Any spider will do that,” he said. “Spiders don’t discriminate. They eat anything that gets into their web.” He also said that where there were joros, there were fewer native spiders, a result he said was typical of invasive species.

But Davis said he saw joro webs next to webs woven by other species of spiders, an indication that the joros were not driving away other species.

Davis said Joros seemed shy, based on an experiment in which he blew air on them with a turkey baster. “They don’t like that, and they freeze,” he told me. “You can time how long they stay in that position.” He clocked other species of spiders at about two minutes. The joros he tested remained motionless for an hour.

Joros are also relatively harmless. Their venom is apparently too weak to hurt humans.

“From what I understand, it feels like a bee sting,” Davis said. “I’ve treated about 500. I haven’t been bitten yet. You would have to handle the spider before it would bite you, but the same goes for a bee. If you leave it alone, it will leave you alone.”

Weather

It will be another cold day with high temperatures around 40 degrees. In the evening temperatures drop below freezing, with a minimum temperature around 29 degrees.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In force until December 25 (Christmas Day).

The latest New York news

New York’s highest court has effectively erased the map that helped Republicans flip four seats in the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections.

The state appeals court told the state to redraw the map, essentially reopening a lawsuit with national implications. Small shifts in district boundaries could dramatically boost the chances of Democratic candidates and threaten the narrow majority in the House of Representatives, which now stands at three seats after the expulsion of George Santos, a Republican from New York.

The court, by a majority of one vote, ordered the state to restart the mapping process. The court took away that authority last year after an attempted gerrymandering. Republicans, who opposed a redrawing of district lines, are vowing to question any map that emerges if they believe it violates a constitutional ban on gerrymandering. That raised the possibility of a new legal battle over redistribution.

The dispute dates back to 2022, when New York was redrawing its House districts to reflect population shifts in the 2020 census. A bipartisan commission was supposed to do the job, but it stalled. The legislature, controlled by Democrats, unilaterally approved maps that increased their chances of winning multiple seats.

Republicans sued, and the Court of Appeals ruled that the Democrats’ plan violated a constitutional amendment banning gerrymandering. The court then hired a neutral special master to draw another map, the one that allowed Republicans to flip and win four seats in 11 of the state’s 26 congressional districts.

The lawsuit that spawned the case decided by the Court of Appeals on Tuesday was paid for by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington. And the court now has a different chief judge: Rowan Wilson, who had been an associate judge on the court since 2017 and is considered more liberal than his predecessor, Janet DiFiore, who resigned last year. Judge Wilson has also taken a broader view of the legislature’s role in redistricting.

METROPOLITAN diary

Gas bill

Dear Diary:

In the fall of 1977, I was living in a second-floor studio apartment in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights when I received a phone call from the young woman who had just moved into the garden apartment below.

She said she was having trouble getting Brooklyn Union Gas to open a new account because the trooper couldn’t find the address of the building, probably because the entrance was downstairs and not up stairs like all the other buildings on our side of the street. .

She had taken my name from the mailbox and asked if I could give her my account number so the company could find her.

The request seemed reasonable enough, so I found my bill and gave her my account number.

A few weeks later I asked her out. We got married the following spring and have now shared our energy bills for 45 years.

– John M. George Jr.

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send your entries here And read more Metropolitan Diary here.