Crystal’s backyard has been invaded and she has questions. This week on More Morgellons: the Joro spider, the silkworm computer, the cockroach with the Xbox controller, and what it means to be early instead of wrong.
The Joro spider (Trichonephila clavata) arrived in Georgia around 2013 and has spread across the Southeast — confirmed in the Smoky Mountains, reportedly now in California. The official line is they’re shy, they’re harmless, they eat stink bugs, leave them alone. Crystal read the brochure. She has notes.
In this episode:
• The University of Georgia turkey baster study and the 67-minute freeze response (other orb-weavers average 96 seconds)
• Why elevated heart rate during a freeze is biologically backwards but device-behavior forwards
• Joro silk: gold pigmentation, tensile strength comparable to high-grade steel, 200–400% elasticity, and why the military has been trying to synthesize it for forty years
• JSTX-3, the glutamate receptor inhibitor in Joro venom that neuroscience supply catalogs have sold by name for decades
• Reports of Joros building preferentially on power line infrastructure
• The international black market for invasive arthropods, the guy with the briefcase of ants in Nairobi, and how a Joro might end up in a shipping container
Then we zoom out to the broader pattern — the openly published cyborg insect research that’s been running for almost twenty years:
• DARPA’s HI-MEMS program (Hybrid Insect Micro-Electromechanical Systems) and the moth-pupa electrode work
• The remote-controlled cockroach demos posted to YouTube in 2009 (with the Xbox controller)
• Russia’s pigeon surveillance program
• China’s 2024 bee neural control announcement — 90% accuracy, stated use case: covert reconnaissance
• Donghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences feeding silkworms cadmium, gold, carbon nanotubes, and graphene — and the resulting silk that conducts electricity and forms self-healing logic gates
The episode closes with the question Crystal keeps coming back to: where exactly is the line between vigilance and paranoia, and who gets to draw it?
Listener mail: A one-year update from a listener living with a Morgellons self-diagnosis, on being believed by family after a long stretch of dismissal. Send your own messages, written or voice — Crystal will listen. moremorgellons.com
Mentioned:
University of Georgia entomology Joro behavior studies · DARPA HI-MEMS · Donghua University silk bioelectronics research · JSTX-3 in neuroscience literature
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