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.

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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.

---

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.

---

See it, crush it, report it. That’s been the spotted lanternfly’s mantra of summers past, and the conspicuous critters are back this year, despite New Yorkers’ best efforts.

Native to parts of Asia, the spotted lanternfly was first seen in the United States almost ten years ago, when it was found at a Pennsylvania landscaping company that imported stones from abroad. It arrived in New York in the summer of 2020.

At this time of year, the spotted lanternfly is in its early nymphal stage, which takes place immediately after hatching. The tiny black insects are dotted with white spots during this stage, before developing their iconic gray and red coloration as adults in July.

Why it’s important to kill lanternflies

The Ministry of Agriculture strongly encourages people to stomp, squash or swat lanternflies when they see them. Officials have been recruiting residents along the East Coast for years to join the effort.

That’s because while spotted lanternflies are harmless to humans, they are an invasive species that can cause widespread economic damage, primarily by damaging plants.

Julia Urbanan evolutionary biologist in the department of entomology at Penn State, has been studying lanternflies for decades.

She said one 2019 report from the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciencesestimating that the bugs could cause $325 million in economic losses annually in Pennsylvania alone had proved exaggerated.

The report analyzed an infestation in South Korea that affected the growth of apple, stone fruit, timber and ornamental trees, whose Pennsylvania counterparts fared better than expected against the insects.

But she said the state’s vines, another preferred food source for the spotted lanternfly, had been badly infested and Pennsylvania growers had recorded reduced yields since the arrival of the beetle.

And the threat to New York’s much larger wine industry is even greater.

“The spotted lanternfly is knocking at the doors of vineyards in Long Island and the Finger Lakes region,” Professor Urban said. “I’m afraid if it gets into these vineyards, the volume will kick up a notch in terms of economic impact.”

Bruce Murray, 67, owns Boundary Breaks Vineyard near the Finger Lakes in Lodi, NY. He noted that spotted lanternflies had been spotted in Ithaca, just 25 miles away, and said his growers were looking forward to their arrival.

“Everyone is hypervigilant about this, and we have been for almost two years now,” Mr Murray said.

While it’s still too early for Mr. Murray to break out the insecticide, he’s prepared by cutting down Tree of Heaven plants, an invasive species from China that lanternflies feed on, whenever he sees them.

How gardeners can fight back against lanternflies

Neal Weissman, 68, is the president of the Roosevelt Island Garden Club and helps oversee the Manhattan borough’s large community garden.

As a member of the garden’s pest control committee, he wanders between plots with a handheld vacuum and vacuums up any lanternfly nymphs he encounters, hoping to keep the populace at bay.

The daily vacuuming, Mr. Weissman said, “began to give me nightmares.”

He said he had noticed an “exponential” increase in the number of lanternflies and his traps had caught the same number in one hour as they caught in an entire weekend last year.

Grape growers on Roosevelt Island, which sits in the East River, are already seeing a decline in plant health this season, with some gardeners removing their vines entirely to curb the insect’s spread.

Pia Doane, 77, has been gardening on Roosevelt Island for over 30 years. Mrs. Doane swears by a vegetable oil-based spray called Gronnsape to tackle the bug: a cleaner who, like her, hails from Scandinavia.

Still, her languishing champagne vines have been infested with lanternflies, and she’s considering throwing in the towel and giving up grapes altogether this year.

“My poor vines,” said Mrs. Doane. “It’s very frustrating.”

Mr. Weissman has considered using mantises, one of the lanternfly’s few natural predators, to control the population. But he said those available for purchase are non-native and members of his garden’s board had opposed the introduction of another invasive bug.

Known predators also include wheel beetles, spiders and some birds, though none of them seem to be making a dent in the population, Professor Urban said.

The club has weighed in with tape to catch the lanternflies, but that risks ensnaring beneficial insects, such as pollinators, and even small birds.

For now, the island’s gardeners are sticking to other pesticide-free strategies, including small vacuum cleaners and special tree traps specifically targeting lanternflies.

Do lanternflies really have to die?

Those hesitant to kill lanternflies they see should know that the choice is squash or spread, experts say.

Base-level eradication is unlikely to occur, so containment is the goal. By killing the ones you see, they and their eggs cannot follow you in your car or even on an airplane.

The insects multiply readily in the wild, and they’ve even appeared on cargo flights to California, where an infestation would be economically “devastating,” Professor Urban said.

California is home to the nation’s largest wine industry, contributing $73 billion to the state and $170.5 billion to the U.S. economy, according to a report commissioned by the Wine Institute and the California Association of Winegrape Growers.

“I like them, and I don’t like killing them either,” Professor Urban said. “But killing them by stomping is better than destroying them with pesticides.”

As global supply chains become increasingly intertwined, the environmental impact of trade continues to grow. Invasive species introduced through imports, such as the spotted lanternfly, will have to be controlled with means that may feel inappropriate to some.

Yet there is an affinity with the spotted lanternfly. “These are little gems of science,” Professor Urban said.