ATHENS, Ga. -- A new species of spider has made its way into North America – and it's been spotted in Georgia, University of Georgia scientists said.
Wesley Huffmaster thought that the brightly colored spider he saw near his home in Colbert, Ga. looked unusual. He brought the spider to UGA entomologist E. Richard Hoebeke at the Georgia Museum of Natural History.
"It kind of knocked my socks off when I saw it," Hoebeke said in a news release. "It didn't look like anything we've seen among the native spider fauna."
Hoebeke identified the boldly patterned crawler as an East Asian Joro spider.
According to a news release from UGA, the Joro spider is part of a group of spiders known as golden orb-web weavers. They are known for their multilayered webs of gold-colored silk. This group of spiders is found in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. One, the banana spider, is native to the southeastern United States.
After an article was written about the Joro spider sighting in Colbert, Hoebeke and museum director Byron J. Freeman received numerous reports from people in Barrow, Jackson and Madison counties.
Several of the Georgia spiders were confirmed as Joro spiders. Freeman said they were closely related to spiders from China and Japan. Researchers suspect the spider made its way in on shipper containers, among packing material, or possibly live plant material.
Should you be concerned about being bitten by a Joro spider? Well, Hoebeke said that any spider can bite, and the majority of the 4,000 species of spiders in the U.S. are poisonous "to some extent." But human skin protects us from most bites. A small handful of spiders -- including the brown recluse, black widow and hobo -- can cause more serious problems.
"If bitten by the Joro spider, one would likely feel a localized pain and redness with blisters forming," Hoebeke told 11Alive in an email. "Its venom is 'potent,' but not necessarily lethal to humans. Someone who has severe allergies to insect/arthropod bites might react more severely to a bite from the Joro spider. The same goes for stings from honey bees and hornets and the like."
Thus far, the Joro spider doesn't appear to post a threat to the environment, Freeman said.
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