One day, while walking outside his home in Florida, Rodger McFarland noticed something odd. Near the ground along a gravelly walkway, a small rock appeared to be levitating on its own.
Rodger was blown away.
“At first, I thought I might be having some type of hallucinatory flashback due to poor choices I made in the ‘80s,” he wrote.
Last month, Juanita O La had a similar encounter with a floating rock near her home in Western Australia, which she also captured on video. And her bewilderment at the sight was clear.
“Pardon my French at the start,” she wrote.
Even her dog was baffled.
As paranormal-seeming as these cases were, the “floating” rocks were not actually floating. Instead, as both Rodger and Juanita later discovered, they were suspended by nearly invisible strands of spider silk connected to a web overhead, acting like an anchor.
In yet another video, a homeowner filmed both a “floating” rock and the little spider, whom she named Charlotte, responsible for putting it there.
The spiders behind these unusual rock-incorporating web designs are believed to be orb weaver spiders — known for their meticulous construction ability.
Often, orb weavers will build a new web every day, taking down the previous one after a single use.
While there’s some speculation that these “floating” rocks have intentionally been suspended by the spiders as a counterweight, when presented with a few examples, University of Oxford biologist and orb weaver researcher Thomas Hesselberg has another explanation.
“I think the most likely case here is that the spiders thought the rocks were fixed to the ground and therefore attached their anchor threads to them by mistake,” Hesselberg told The Dodo. “The whole point of a fixed web is to keep it as rigid as possible.”
In other words, the spiders hadn’t considered that the rocks would lift when pulling their silk taut.
Whatever the explanation, the effect feels almost like a magic trick. And although the rocks aren’t truly defying gravity, the work of these tiny spiders can still defy expectations.
