Flying Plankton
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook. Today, we're going to see how spiders fly, and how they use the weather to inhabit desolate islands.

Lets go back to 1883. That's when Krakatau, an island in Indonesia, was destroyed by a volcanic eruption. What was once a rainforest became a 5 square mile heap of smoldering rock in an instant, with no life on it at all. Botanists of the day quickly realized that they were now presented with a remarkable opportunity -- to observe how life replenishes itself.

Nine months after the explosion, a team of French scientists visited the island searching for life and found only a single tiny spider spinning it's web. The process that delivered this spider to the island was something called ballooning, where spiders spin out enough thread to catch the wind and lift them into the air -- their landing spot determined by the current weather. Spiders can, in this manner, travel from leaf to leaf or from continent to continent. They are the atmospheric equivalent of oceanic plankton, the organisms that drift with the ocean currents. The wind and weather spawned an entire ecosystem by delivering aeolian plankton to the lifeless landscape of Krakatau. Today this same island is on it's way back to becoming a rich tropical rainforest, pioneered by a single spider.

The Weather Notebook is produced by the Mount Washington Observatory in and is supported The National Science Foundation and Subaru. For more on flying spiders, spin your way to our website at weathernotebook.org.