{"id":393371,"date":"2026-04-11T14:30:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T14:30:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/393371\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T14:30:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T14:30:20","slug":"tiny-floating-rocks-keep-surprising-people-and-a-spider-is-behind-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/393371\/","title":{"rendered":"Tiny \u2018Floating\u2019 Rocks Keep Surprising People \u2014 And A Spider Is Behind Them"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Rodger was blown away.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt first, I thought I might be having some type of hallucinatory flashback due to poor choices I made in the \u201880s,\u201d he wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cPardon my French at the start,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

Even her dog was baffled.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In yet another video, a homeowner filmed both a \u201cfloating\u201d rock and the little spider, whom she named Charlotte, responsible for putting it there.<\/p>\n

The spiders behind these unusual rock-incorporating web designs are believed to be orb weaver spiders \u2014 known for their meticulous construction ability.<\/p>\n

Often, orb weavers will build a new web every day, taking down the previous one after a single use.<\/p>\n

Getty Images\/mirceax<\/a><\/p>\n

While there\u2019s some speculation that these \u201cfloating\u201d 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<\/a> has another explanation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d Hesselberg told The Dodo. \u201cThe whole point of a fixed web is to keep it as rigid as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, the spiders hadn\u2019t considered that the rocks would lift when pulling their silk taut.<\/p>\n

Whatever the explanation, the effect feels almost like a magic trick. And although the rocks aren\u2019t truly defying gravity, the work of these tiny spiders can still defy expectations.<\/p>\n

\"Woman<\/a>Woman Forms Magical Friendship With A Tiny Spider Living In Her BathroomThe started the sweetest routine \u2764\ufe0f\ud83d\udd77\ufe0f<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One day, while walking outside his home in Florida, Rodger McFarland noticed something odd. Near the ground along…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[1285,61,60,82,26850,1284,15034,1282,263],"class_list":{"0":"post-393371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-daily-dodo","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-spiders","13":"tag-standard","14":"tag-stephen-messenger","15":"tag-the-dodo","16":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}