Though media reports are buzzing with tales of an invasive, parachuting arachnid with four-inch legs, the Joro spider doesn’t appear to have landed yet in Arlington.
The bug, a native of East Asia introduced to Georgia in the 2010s, has generated headlines across the Eastern seaboard this week. Though of minimal threat to humans, the creature’s size and its spiderlings’ habit of gliding for miles on strands of web have raised cries of disgust and alarm.
But as of yet, at least, Arlington seems to be free of the attention-getting arthropod.
“At this point we are not aware of any reports of these spiders in Virginia,” Arlington’s Master Gardener desk informed ARLnow. “Their range is currently identified as Georgia with overlap in adjoining states.”
Sightings of the spider have been getting closer to Northern Virginia in recent years, however.
On iNaturalist, an app where users share the location of species they see, the closest Joro spiders to Arlington were spotted in the Baltimore area last year. Others have been seen in locales ranging from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Alabama, according to a 2022 study in the journal Biological Invasions.
“Joro spiders are typically very easy to spot, so if someone has seen one, we would likely have heard by now,” Arlington County spokesperson Jerry Solomon told ARLnow.
The spiders tend to be “extremely shy and not very dangerous,” Solomon said.
“They are venomous, but are typically unable to break human skin, so they should not be considered threats to people or pets,” she added. “While they are new to the region, we continue to monitor their presence and the potential impacts they may have in the area.”
If Joro spiders do arrive here, Michael Raupp, an entomology professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, told Fox 5 that he’s looking forward to catching a glimpse of “a rather beautiful and spectacular spider.”
“It’s just going to be a curious, interesting and rather harmless spider, so let’s get over it and kind of move forward and enjoy it as much as possible,” Raupp said.
