CHARGE AND INSECTS: How ticks, worms, and other insects use static electricity to help attach to their hosts.
(I am in the midst of writing something quite lengthy and time consuming. Enjoy this interlude)
Just some studies for you to read;
Static electricity passively attracts ticks onto hosts
”Static charges of animals result in strong electric fields when close to vegetation
Ticks are pulled by these electric fields across air gaps of several body lengths
This likely increases the host-seeking efficiency of ticks and other ectoparasites
Electrostatic attraction of ticks is independent of the host’s charge polarity”
Static electricity helps parasitic nematodes glom onto victims
“To test the effect of electric charge, Ortega Jiménez and colleagues mounted dead fruit flies on wires and placed them near a surface covered in nematodes. With no charge on a fly, only nematodes that happened to jump in the direction of the insect landed on target, as expected. When researchers applied an electric charge to a suspended fruit fly, even nematodes that initially headed in the wrong direction were caught up in the electric field and pulled onto the fly.”
Wow
Insect swarms charge the atmosphere with static electricity
”“How insect swarms influence atmospheric electricity depends on their density and size,” explained study co-author Liam O’Reilly, a biologist at the University of Bristol. “We also calculated the influence of locusts on atmospheric electricity, as locusts swarm on biblical scales, sizing 460 square miles with 80 million locusts in less than a square mile; their influence is likely much greater than honeybees.”
The researchers measured the electrical charge on individual desert locusts Schistocerca gregaria (805 + 295 Picocoulombs) and multiplied this by published estimates of swarm numbers to determine the possible effect of swarming locusts on local atmospheric electric fields.
The results revealed that locust swarms have the potential to alter their local electrical environment to an extent that is comparable with meteorological events such as thunderstorms. Butterflies, on the other hand, were found to have far less of an effect on electric fields due to their tendency to move around at much lower densities.
“We only recently discovered that biology and static electric fields are intimately linked and that there are many unsuspected links that can exist over different spatial scales, ranging from microbes in the soil and plant-pollinator interactions to insect swarms and perhaps the global electric circuit,” said Hunting.”
Insect swarms might generate as much electric charge as storm clouds
ELECTROSTATIC CHARGES ON INSECTS DUE TO CONTACT WITH DIFFERENT SUBSTRATES