This emerging field, known as airborne electronic sensing, adds a new dimension to the natural world. “I find it absolutely fascinating,” he said Anna Dornhausis a behavioral ecologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved in this study. “This entire field of studying electrostatic interactions between living animals has the potential to reveal things we hadn’t thought of about how the world works.”

“We know from all these brilliant experiments that electric fields have a functional role in the ecology of these animals,” he said. Benito WainwrightSt. Evolutionary ecologist at the University of Andrews who studies the sensory systems of butterflies and katydids. “This doesn’t mean they first arrived on the scene through adaptation processes.” But now that these forces exist, evolution can act on them. Even though we cannot feel these electrical traces, they can lead us to animal behaviors we have never imagined.

Electrostatic Discoveries

in 2012 Víctor Ortega-Jiménez She encountered electrostatics while playing with her 4-year-old daughter. They used a toy wand that collected a static charge to lift light objects, such as balloons, into the air. When they decided to try it outside, he made a surprising observation.

PICTURE
Caption: Research by Víctor Ortega-Jiménez of the University of California at Berkeley found that a negatively charged spider web attracts positively charged insect prey.
Credits: Courtesy of Víctor Ortega-Jiménez

“My daughter brought the wand close to a spider web and she reacted very quickly,” recalled Ortega-Jiménez, who studies the biomechanics of animal travel at the University of California, Berkeley. The staff pulled the net. He immediately began making connections with his research on the strange ways insects interact with their environment.

All matter (wands, balloons, nets, air) tries to establish balance between its positive and negative particles (protons, electrons and ions). Ortega-Jiménez’s toy hums with an imbalance on an impossibly small scale: A motor pulls negative charges inward, forcing positive charges to the surface of the wand. This is static. It’s like rubbing a balloon on your head. Friction transfers electrons from your hair to the rubber, charging it with static charge so that when you lift the balloon, the strands of hair float with it.

Similarly, Ortega-Jiménez reasoned that the friction caused by the flapping of insect wings could scatter negative charges from the body into the air, creating negative static regions, leaving the insects with a positive charge. He realized that if a web carries a negative charge and attracts insects with a positive one, the spider web may not just be a passive trap but can move towards and electrostatically attract prey. Laboratory experiments revealed exactly this. networks instantly deformed when they are jolted by static electricity from flies, aphids, honey bees, and even water droplets. Spiders caught loaded insects more easily. He saw how static electricity changed the physics of animal interactions.