Scary story time! The Hockey Schtick catches the latest about spiders from ABC News. After discussing a person getting a horrific bite from a Brown Recluse (which they later go on to say “it could have been something else”) in Kansas, we get
The Daily Mail sounded an alarm about a University of Kansas study by graduate student Erin Saupe, saying the “deadly” spider was “spreading … to a town near you.”
The study was published last year in the online journal PlosOne
The spider’s habitat is limited to the Southeast and Midwest, stretching from Kansas east to the Appalachian states.
But Saupe of the university’s Geology and Biodiversity Institute used computer modeling to predict how it’s habitat might move north to states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and even New York, dependent on climatic suitability for the species.
Go that? Might move north. The computers tell us so. I suppose going out in the field to verify would be silly.
Vetter worked with Saupe on her master’s project, in which she tracked the spiders’ predicted migration through “ecological niche modeling.”
She used two models to predict the spider’s range in 2020, 2050 and 2080, given the effects of global warming, concluding they might move north but those left behind would die off.
Kansas is a “hotbed” for these spiders, said Saupe, who has predicted that they might become extinct in the southern portions of their range by 2080 as the climate in their natural habitats becomes to warm and their mobility is restricted.
Yawn. Let me know when it happens here in Reality Land.
