> The magic of animal electrostatics is all about size. Large animals don’t meaningfully experience nature’s static—we’re too big to feel it. “As humans, we are living mostly in a gravitational or fluid-dynamics world,” Ortega-Jiménez said. But for tiny beings, gravity is an afterthought. Insects can feel air’s viscosity. While the same laws of physics reign over Earth’s smallest and largest species, the balance of forces shifts with size.

Very cool article. For example: butterflies accumulate a positive charge when beating their wings, which causes pollen to jump through the air toward them when they land on flowers.

Excellent article, and some fascinating discoveries. The idea of passive pollen spread via static buildup on pollinators make sense, but is kind of mind blowing to me at the same time.

For a much more enjoyable reading experience (at least on mobile):

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-hidden-world-of-electrost...

(From the same article:)

Interesting that ticks literally get pulled like a magnet towards their targets due to electrostatic forces.

This article has multiple videos of it:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)...

> A few years after Ortega-Jiménez noticed spiderwebs nabbing bugs, Robert’s team found that bees can gather negatively charged pollen without brushing up against it.

It's arguably kind of weird that this is just being noticed now. I suppose possibly modern camera equipment helps, for purposes of actually _seeing_ it happen...

If insects can build up 5 kilovolts while flying, then why can I zap flies with a fly-zapping tool that presumably runs at a similar or lower voltage?

> Webs deformed instantly when jolted with static from flies, aphids, honeybees, and even water droplets. Spiders caught charged insects more easily.

This is all so fascinating!

Could a cloud of midges make a path to ground for lightning?

>spiders take flight by extending a silk thread to catch charges in the sky

I did some amateur research on spider ballooning many years ago and I believe part of the lift comes from rising air dragging along the silk thread. From my calculations, it wasn't enough to lift the spider on its own, but it might allow the spider to fall slower than the convective air currents were rising.

https://archive.is/T1bds

but if anybody regular worries about the (quite new) abundance of EM radiation one's the nutjob

"They were using a toy wand that gathers static charge to levitate lightweight objects, such as a balloon." -- How much science progresses through play.

This makes me wonder if cave dwelling species which live in darkness have any specially evolved features dealing with electric charge.

See also magnetic sensing (magnetoreception) in animals used for orientation and navigation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoreception

There are other electromagnetic type things too, like use of light (camouflage, bioluminescence, eyes) and electricity (electric eels, bioelectrical cues for stem cell differentiation).

EDIT: Also the literal electrical potential within cells: the membrane potential, that is the voltage difference between inside and outside every cell.

An interesting area!

Really interesting article. Highlights something I think is so cool but have a hard time really articulating: how even within our own 3+1 dimensions, just changing your scale is an entirely different experience.

All this in 55 pages of text. Wired, never changes. They rob your time with unnecessary wall of text. blablablbla