A couple years ago I had an experience with a spider that entirely changed my perspective on them and most insects, and now I make a conscious effort to help them as much as possible, instead of kill or even repel them.
This particular spider kept running back and forth between my monitor and a window, and when it'd get to my monitor, it would wave its front legs at me. If I moved to the left, it would run across to the left side of the monitor and waves it legs again. If I stood up and moved closer to it, it would run back to the window, turn around, and waves its legs at me. From watching YouTube too much, I was always under the impression that this was either a sign of aggression or a defensive stance.
But after a few times of going back and forth like this, I realized there were approximately 50 baby spiders around a light by the window, which had been closed since the previous day. Normally this would be a nightmare for me (I've always had a fear of spiders), but after a while, I had this crazy notion that the spider was trying to get me to open the window. So I did, and it immediately ran to the babies, wrapped a single strand of silk around the old webbing, and started dragging swaths of the babies' webbing toward the window.
I have no idea if the room was just dry and they needed some humidity, or if the food had been too scarce for too long. Whatever it was, that parent spider was in full blown panic mode, and managed to effectively communicate their problem to a human. I haven't killed any spiders or insects since (aside from a few particularly asshole-ish mosquitos), and actually keep small water dishes in my bathroom for two spiders who've now lived with me for nearly a year. If any babies hatch inside and get close to me, I use my phone's flash to guide them back to a corner with a light on -- they are seemingly always drawn to the brightest light source.
Spiders are incredible creatures, and I deeply regret not realizing that sooner.
I had a similar experience with a spider who had made an egg sack in a precarious spot along our back door that was definitely in hazard's way. I got a stick and a leaf and tried to detach and move her setup to a nearby spot that would be safer. She did not like that.
At one point in the move, she got left behind and I ended up with just the egg sack to move. You could feel the panic and protective instinct in her movements. I got her onto the leaf and reunited with her eggs on a nearby plant and she quickly went to work finding the right spot and securing her sack to the underside of one of its leaves.
I watched her there for a while in her new location, and there is absolutely more than just instinct at play.
I didn't grow up liking spiders much, but gardening in particular has given me a new perspective on them. One measure of our garden's health is the amount of spiders we see, keeping other would-be pests in check.
There's something that gets to me anytime I see animals with their offsprings.
A documentary about octopuses last moments in life, really shook me. It might be interpretation/anthropomorphism but anyway, apparently after laying eggs, the octo mom will breath out water (warmed by her body) around them. The process lasts a while and when she's exhausted she spends the remaining energy to swim as far as possible and die. The theory being she'd rather not attract predators with her corpse. A final step in sacrifice.
I too now try to redirect life forms to where they can live better. I used to seriously arachnophobic but nowadays I can manage grabbing a box or a long piece of paper to move insects around or outside if needs be.
I used to let spiders live freely in my house, until one time I wanted to go to bed at night and noticed dozens of black spots on the bed cover. I looked up and saw hundreds of tiny spider babies on the ceiling. From then on, whenever I see a spider in the house I get rid of it. Sorry...
Mothers love is the primal force of the universe. Not just mammals (including humans, of course but read up on other vertebrates such as crocodiles and birds). Another poster mentions gastropods (octopus).
You see it in plants. Trees preferentially share of resources with their offspring.
Thanks for sharing an amazing story. I'm not surprised to see motherly love in spiders.
It’s SO cool when you have one of these experiences with a wild animal. A tiny little moment of true connection and communication. Thanks for the story.
I keep several tarantulas and a few other spiders, and they are absolutely fascinating! Your description of the spider waving its arms and running from side to side makes me think it was likely a jumping spider. This group of spiders have large eyes and don't build webs to catch prey, and are really cute!
This is a bit more elaborate behaviour than what I have observed from our (small) spiders here, but as a general rule, I don't do anything to spiders in my apartment as well. They keep their territory clean of other insects and do not get into my way, so I like keeping them. Unless the spider is really large, aggressive or poisonous, I do not get why so many people are afraid of them either. Perhaps that the Australian Exception :)
We have an influx of Joro spiders in our area (N/Central GA), and they are absolute nightmare fuel. I can't have them in my porch or where people are going to be; their webs are big and sticky, but I'm having a hard time bringing myself to killing them.
There is a Russian (Eastern European? Slavic?) superstition against kill spiders. You can kill insects all day, but you don’t kill spiders. You just leave them be.
That’s all well and good until you live somewhere with a large population of brown recluse spiders, and a healthy fear of them can keep you from losing a limb.
One of my school friends walked a different path from me and became a paramedic. He used to have to go to homes in "socioeconomically challenged areas" in order to revive people who had taken substances that they should not have taken - and also other things which were even less good. On one of these trips in a drug hell hole he saw a tank with a spider in it, and he realised that these people were likely mistreating it. So he asked if they wanted it and after a short conversation bought it off them for a nominal amount.
So - he had a tarantula. I had never seen or met a thing like that and I was fascinated. It was very shy at first - it spent all day everyday hiding, possibly because of fear of drug addicts. But eventually it got a bit more confident. The thing was, it recognised and remembered individual humans. When it first met you or saw you it would hide. If you were calm and Kit (the paramedic) was calm with you it would come out and allow you to stroke it. This might take a few visits. But, once you had won it's confidence it would come right out and say hi as soon as you were in the room.
I came to believe that it was self aware, and that it had a mental model that included social interactions and trust. It was just a belief, as it's really hard to see the anecdote and experience I have as data, but that's what interacting with it made me think. I thought it was as smart as a cat, or maybe even a dog.
I've seen similar behavior from garden spiders that I've taken inside before winter. They are afraid at first but eventually warm up to me and let me pet them. Spiders are very cool creatures. An analog of human intelligence, as unique as octopi.
Talking about Portias, I recommend reading "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky, it's about the process of uplifting spiders and how humans re-establish contacts with them. Another great book about smart "spiders" is "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge, my favorite in the "Zones of Thought" series.
I can also recommend "Children of time", it's a really good sci-fi book. There's a sequel called "Children of Ruin", but I can't comment on it as I haven't finished reading it.
One of my favorite sci-fi books of all time. What makes it so good is how the author manages to get you to see the world through the (many) eyes of the Portia spider, and evolve it they get uplifted.
The use of ants is pure genius.
The sequel, Children of Ruin, is likewise compelling, but lacks some of the finesse and mystique of the first book.
Idk how it compares to the aforementioned books, but there is also a series of fiction by Colin Wilson “Spider World: …” (1987+). It was a great read when I was a teenager.
The Tower is a novel in which humankind has been reduced to slavery and outlawry by giant spiders in the far future.
- Spiders are much smarter than you think
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Context switching is hard for the brain. Even in readabilty mode I get substracted by the image descriptions.
they are! once i found a baby spider in the jacuzzi and just let it stay there out of laziness. it set up shop in one of the water jet holes. it gradually grew and started catching the real enemy, the mosquitoes.
as a “thank you”, once every couple of days i’d catch a fly and feed it to him. i’d tap the electric fly swatter on the jacuzzi wall to drop the fly. this tapping sound quickly became sort of a pavlovian affair. as soon as i’d tap the fly swatter, he would rush out of the hole and grab its treat!
I once had a huge spider problem. Spiders all over the deck, etc.
Called an exterminator, and he laughed. He said you don't have a spider problem, you have an ant problem. The ants inhabited the wood interior of the deck, and the spiders were eating them.
The ants completely hollowed out the deck, though they left the paint alone, so it looked fine. I was horrified that I could just push a screwdriver through it. It had to be completely replaced.
When I sawed it off of the house, it collapsed into a heap of wood chips and sawdust. I didn't load the lumber into a truck, I shoveled it in. I'm amazed the deck never collapsed under my weight.
My deck is now iron and concrete. No more spiders.
I also had yellowjackets everywhere. In the house, around the house, everywhere. The exterminator told me the problem was the wood roof shingles, as yellowjackets liked to nest in them. Replaced the shingles with asphalt ones, no more yellowjackets.
I tend to leave the spiders alone because they eat the other annoying insects.
As soon as I opened that article, I pressed CTRL+F and searched for "jumping spider". I knew it had to be about them!
I'm not sure I would consider them "smart", but they are definitely exhibit an awareness of their surroundings that is not as obvious in other arachnids or arthropods. It's fun to watch them explore their terrain, stalk and catch prey much larger than they are, and of course jump relatively large distances like pros.
In our house the rule is all fast and web spiders are removed. The jumping spiders and the big lazy floppy guys that hang on the ceiling are allies. They are non-aggressive and clearly eating something that shouldn't be in the house. My wife keeps walls of plants, it's basically a botanical greenhouse on the south side of the house. So a lively ecosystem.
Here in AZ we get a fairly big jumping spider with a red on the top abdomen, we call 'em red butt spiders. No one harms the red butt spiders! If one is down at person level I like to gently interact with it. If you slowly move a finger near it, it will rotate and examine, and then scoot an inch away. Not too fearful. Usually a single one wins out, and will live with us until fall. A familiar housemate. We also get fairly big tarantulas, maybe 4" across the span. (Outside) They don't strike me as intelligent, not like jumping spiders. I always stop and scoot them off the road when I'm biking. I have seen a tarantula hawk hauling one much bigger than itself in my yard, off to its doom.
Like you, on reading the title of the article, I thought, I bet it's about jumping spiders!
They're relatively smart in that they can quite intelligently navigate their environment to best get at prey that might otherwise kill them.
Really, all animals are relatively smart (ignoring individual differences in a species), in that they have specific skills and abilities that allow them to be most effective for their biological makeup, and purpose in their respective ecosystems.
We humans are no different in that regard ~ we are relatively smart, in that our biological makeups grant us leanings towards skills and abilities that other animals don't have.
Reminds me of an observation that humans developed imagination(seeing that is unseen) from avoiding threats of snakes which were the most dangerous predator to early primates. It required sharp visual skills to distinguish snakes from its ambush, and also imagination (second vision) of snake's potential ambush.
I’ve also seen the video/gif of quickly changed pictures, where after viewing you’re asked to estimate the percentage of spiders and snakes in it. People tend to 50%+, overestimating by an order of magnitude. We are evolutionarily aware of these little fuckers and that trait didn’t come for free.
Another qurious work describing non-vertebrate cognition was the recent document "My octopus teacher". As a person without deep experience of them and while octopus are known to be smart that document kind of rubs in your face what it means to have such level of talent when they live in their natural habitat instead of an aquarium pool performing party tricks.
The portia genus are incredibly smart. I believe it is because its vision system, comparing to other spiders. Watch some videos on youtube and it chills how calculated the hunt is.
> “Jumping spiders are remarkably clever animals,” says visual ecologist Nathan Morehouse, who studies the spiders at the University of Cincinnati. “I always find it delightful when something like a humble jumping spider punctures our sense of biological superiority.”
I just find this notion bizarre, like we're all overblown ignoramuses strutting around thinking: 'I'm soooo much better than x pathetic creature!', and deserve to be taken down a peg or two. A really odd way to see things, most people I know are fascinated by nature.
It is probably just as well that spiders don't work in groups. A colony of thousands of venomous spiders working together is a terrifying thought (cf the novel "Children of time").
Spiders are often evil in cartoons so children usually do not like them. My children did not watch tv much but still were vary (sometimes afraid) of spiders.
I had them look at them when they work, in forests or sometimes at home and told how useful they are. And suddenly they were happy when a spider lived in they room.
They even managed to convert their friends and recently, some 10 years later, I witnessed how one of said friends noticed a spider on the ceiling and smiled.
If the stereotypes of spiders change, so will their level of acceptance.
Jumping spiders are amazingly fun creatures! Even the smallest ones have personalities and most are curious. Very good eyes that see everything. They catch flies with blazing speed.
For example, with some examples there, like pretending to do a mating ritual for another group of spiders in order to lure the female out, this seems like it's something built in to their neural networks through thousands of years of evolution. It doesn't seem significantly smarter than the other group of species doing mating rituals themselves. They just have a neural network that reacts to certain input with this output that evolution created and honed through all this time of them being around such input and this output causing a better survival performance.
I didn't see anything specific that could've indicated they could learn new things in new situations, so it seems like built in neural networks that come to them rather than them having special smarts to learn new things like humans have.
> Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of 1-year-old humans.
I wonder about conclusions like these. I don't know about 1-year-old humans, but it's understandable that they can measure strength levels depending on the amount of whatever they are observing and if situations change they should recalculate their new decision. I just don't think it's a sense of numbers, it would be more like some sort of amount of input (pheromones, image, whatever) that makes them pay attention that something has changed.
And all in all it seems odd conclusion to compare sense of numbers based on that to 1-year-old humans. Trying to compare it to something, but the way they use those "skills" doesn't really make comparative sense.
I was unpacking some computers we rented to a winery a few weeks ago, and all the boxes came with a different type of spider. My assistant is a young intern and just insisted on killing them (grave mistake, he got some sort of allergic reaction from that stupidity), while I just preferred to take them out the window and let them go (I don't want to hurt them but I don't want them to take residence inside our storage machines, cleaning the webbing is barely registrable as work, but I don't want them to get crushed with the fans or something. Guess I'm a softie at heart.)
Anyway just that simple action shows you a lot about spiders. Some types just climbed on my hand and took the trip to the windowsill without any complaints, or they just somehow climbed off on their own with that parachute of theirs at the exact time I was intending to place them down. Others are more reluctant and they have to be running in a direction for them to climb. However, the most interesting of them was a jumping spider that was trying to make its home inside a crappy HP office computer.
I had never seen a jumping spider in real life, and its behavior was really fascinating. It refused to climb on my hand until the very end, and would wander around, like checking out the place, in a way that looked more like a very weird lost puppy with too many legs, than a bug. After a couple tries it attempted to resist further attempts by putting a recognizable warning stance, so I instead tried to tap my finger on the table to make it run on the opposite direction. After a couple taps it must have realized my bluff and just stared at the finger, confident it won't get hit. In the end it kinda reluctantly climbed my hand and before I was even near the window, it just jumped off like greased lightning and landed exactly where I wanted to put it (not literally, but it did land on the windowsill neatly), paced around a bit scanning the environment, then parachuted down to the street.
I always considered spiders relatively intelligent, specially compared to pests like the mosquito, whose only smarts seem to involve picking the worst time to show up, but otherwise behave like a crappy biological robot (the toy type not even the industrial type). But the way that jumping spider moved and behaved reminded me a lot more of how mammals and birds behave when put in an unknown place and being bothered by a human.
I wonder if there's some relation to their eyesight. I wonder if that increases their awareness of what is what. Surely its brain has to be a bit more developed for visual processing, so perhaps that development has side effects in just making them smarter overall?
I could be falling into the usual trapping of humanizing its behavior, but it really seemed like I was dealing with a very weird-looking mouse or bird than an arachnid. It surely gave the most resistance out of all the spiders I encountered, which just happily climbed my hand and took the train to exitville, but that little bugger seemed to be aware of all the standard bug-herding tricks. I even wonder if it only allowed me to take it near the window because it decided it was where it wanted to go after scanning the environment enough. It might not have known I was taking it towards the window, but it seemed to realize that whatever I was doing, I was giving it a vantage point to reach the window with a jump given the direction I tried to take it in previous attempts before it escaped, which perhaps indicates some degree of abstract thinking?
I'm honestly fascinated about this, so if any of you is an entomologist or arachnid expert I'd like to know a more educated opinion. If I recall correctly jumping spiders are active hunters (as opposed to passive hunters like web spiders), so it'd make sense if they had some ability to think ahead and make basic plans. I don't recognize the specific species this spider was, but it was around the size of my thumb nail, light-ish brown with no particular markings and the first segment of its legs was much wider (around triple the width) than the rest. The boxes came from the northwestern region of Spain, somewhere in Galicia. I thought it was kinda cute even if its head looked like a weird tank turret.
It’s easy to be blind to the intelligence of animals that inhabit places we don’t go or think about.
Then one day, as so many accounts here attest, we notice a spider or an animal cross our realm and see that we have things in common - the urge to protect and nurture our young; the drive for self preservation; the call of hunger or thirst.
We do this not just with insects and animals, but also with other people. That ability to shut out the recognition of other people’s basic needs and feelings helps us to prioritise our own families welfare, and to get ahead personally.
That’s all understandable and ok to an extent. Taken too far, we risk alienating ourselves from something richly rewarding and powerfully good - the fellowship of people, insects and animals we haven’t met yet.
Cool I do wonder how much overlap there is between say nervous systems of insects and evolutionary far away species such as mammals.
Spiders on drugs gives interesting results too, although when I was in school these were being used as part of a "drugs will destroy your life" message...
(sun link I know, but worth a google): https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/6818187/nasa-spider-webs-drugs...
[+] [-] bryans|4 years ago|reply
This particular spider kept running back and forth between my monitor and a window, and when it'd get to my monitor, it would wave its front legs at me. If I moved to the left, it would run across to the left side of the monitor and waves it legs again. If I stood up and moved closer to it, it would run back to the window, turn around, and waves its legs at me. From watching YouTube too much, I was always under the impression that this was either a sign of aggression or a defensive stance.
But after a few times of going back and forth like this, I realized there were approximately 50 baby spiders around a light by the window, which had been closed since the previous day. Normally this would be a nightmare for me (I've always had a fear of spiders), but after a while, I had this crazy notion that the spider was trying to get me to open the window. So I did, and it immediately ran to the babies, wrapped a single strand of silk around the old webbing, and started dragging swaths of the babies' webbing toward the window.
I have no idea if the room was just dry and they needed some humidity, or if the food had been too scarce for too long. Whatever it was, that parent spider was in full blown panic mode, and managed to effectively communicate their problem to a human. I haven't killed any spiders or insects since (aside from a few particularly asshole-ish mosquitos), and actually keep small water dishes in my bathroom for two spiders who've now lived with me for nearly a year. If any babies hatch inside and get close to me, I use my phone's flash to guide them back to a corner with a light on -- they are seemingly always drawn to the brightest light source.
Spiders are incredible creatures, and I deeply regret not realizing that sooner.
[+] [-] lux|4 years ago|reply
At one point in the move, she got left behind and I ended up with just the egg sack to move. You could feel the panic and protective instinct in her movements. I got her onto the leaf and reunited with her eggs on a nearby plant and she quickly went to work finding the right spot and securing her sack to the underside of one of its leaves.
I watched her there for a while in her new location, and there is absolutely more than just instinct at play.
I didn't grow up liking spiders much, but gardening in particular has given me a new perspective on them. One measure of our garden's health is the amount of spiders we see, keeping other would-be pests in check.
[+] [-] agumonkey|4 years ago|reply
A documentary about octopuses last moments in life, really shook me. It might be interpretation/anthropomorphism but anyway, apparently after laying eggs, the octo mom will breath out water (warmed by her body) around them. The process lasts a while and when she's exhausted she spends the remaining energy to swim as far as possible and die. The theory being she'd rather not attract predators with her corpse. A final step in sacrifice.
I too now try to redirect life forms to where they can live better. I used to seriously arachnophobic but nowadays I can manage grabbing a box or a long piece of paper to move insects around or outside if needs be.
[+] [-] tomerv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mellavora|4 years ago|reply
You see it in plants. Trees preferentially share of resources with their offspring.
Thanks for sharing an amazing story. I'm not surprised to see motherly love in spiders.
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[+] [-] sgt101|4 years ago|reply
So - he had a tarantula. I had never seen or met a thing like that and I was fascinated. It was very shy at first - it spent all day everyday hiding, possibly because of fear of drug addicts. But eventually it got a bit more confident. The thing was, it recognised and remembered individual humans. When it first met you or saw you it would hide. If you were calm and Kit (the paramedic) was calm with you it would come out and allow you to stroke it. This might take a few visits. But, once you had won it's confidence it would come right out and say hi as soon as you were in the room.
I came to believe that it was self aware, and that it had a mental model that included social interactions and trust. It was just a belief, as it's really hard to see the anecdote and experience I have as data, but that's what interacting with it made me think. I thought it was as smart as a cat, or maybe even a dog.
[+] [-] goldenkey|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] shostack|4 years ago|reply
The use of ants is pure genius.
The sequel, Children of Ruin, is likewise compelling, but lacks some of the finesse and mystique of the first book.
[+] [-] wruza|4 years ago|reply
The Tower is a novel in which humankind has been reduced to slavery and outlawry by giant spiders in the far future.
[+] [-] dkobia|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tdrdt|4 years ago|reply
It's a pitty because it's a nice article.
[+] [-] smortaz|4 years ago|reply
as a “thank you”, once every couple of days i’d catch a fly and feed it to him. i’d tap the electric fly swatter on the jacuzzi wall to drop the fly. this tapping sound quickly became sort of a pavlovian affair. as soon as i’d tap the fly swatter, he would rush out of the hole and grab its treat!
here’s the video
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0SkC9zuEe9JKh4t2M4DEz2A1w
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
Called an exterminator, and he laughed. He said you don't have a spider problem, you have an ant problem. The ants inhabited the wood interior of the deck, and the spiders were eating them.
The ants completely hollowed out the deck, though they left the paint alone, so it looked fine. I was horrified that I could just push a screwdriver through it. It had to be completely replaced.
When I sawed it off of the house, it collapsed into a heap of wood chips and sawdust. I didn't load the lumber into a truck, I shoveled it in. I'm amazed the deck never collapsed under my weight.
My deck is now iron and concrete. No more spiders.
I also had yellowjackets everywhere. In the house, around the house, everywhere. The exterminator told me the problem was the wood roof shingles, as yellowjackets liked to nest in them. Replaced the shingles with asphalt ones, no more yellowjackets.
I tend to leave the spiders alone because they eat the other annoying insects.
[+] [-] ravenstine|4 years ago|reply
I'm not sure I would consider them "smart", but they are definitely exhibit an awareness of their surroundings that is not as obvious in other arachnids or arthropods. It's fun to watch them explore their terrain, stalk and catch prey much larger than they are, and of course jump relatively large distances like pros.
[+] [-] downut|4 years ago|reply
Here in AZ we get a fairly big jumping spider with a red on the top abdomen, we call 'em red butt spiders. No one harms the red butt spiders! If one is down at person level I like to gently interact with it. If you slowly move a finger near it, it will rotate and examine, and then scoot an inch away. Not too fearful. Usually a single one wins out, and will live with us until fall. A familiar housemate. We also get fairly big tarantulas, maybe 4" across the span. (Outside) They don't strike me as intelligent, not like jumping spiders. I always stop and scoot them off the road when I'm biking. I have seen a tarantula hawk hauling one much bigger than itself in my yard, off to its doom.
Like you, on reading the title of the article, I thought, I bet it's about jumping spiders!
[+] [-] Valmar|4 years ago|reply
Really, all animals are relatively smart (ignoring individual differences in a species), in that they have specific skills and abilities that allow them to be most effective for their biological makeup, and purpose in their respective ecosystems.
We humans are no different in that regard ~ we are relatively smart, in that our biological makeups grant us leanings towards skills and abilities that other animals don't have.
[+] [-] totorovirus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wruza|4 years ago|reply
ps. Can’t find it anywhere, sorry.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] fsloth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swayvil|4 years ago|reply
They have the same thc-receptors in their brain as we do.
It follows that they can get baked, enjoy an expanded consciousness and benefit from hallucinogenic insights just as we humans do.
So get a spider high today.
[+] [-] dekken_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meerita|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] an9n|4 years ago|reply
I just find this notion bizarre, like we're all overblown ignoramuses strutting around thinking: 'I'm soooo much better than x pathetic creature!', and deserve to be taken down a peg or two. A really odd way to see things, most people I know are fascinated by nature.
[+] [-] hermitcrab|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|4 years ago|reply
I had them look at them when they work, in forests or sometimes at home and told how useful they are. And suddenly they were happy when a spider lived in they room.
They even managed to convert their friends and recently, some 10 years later, I witnessed how one of said friends noticed a spider on the ceiling and smiled.
If the stereotypes of spiders change, so will their level of acceptance.
[+] [-] dncornholio|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mewpmewp2|4 years ago|reply
For example, with some examples there, like pretending to do a mating ritual for another group of spiders in order to lure the female out, this seems like it's something built in to their neural networks through thousands of years of evolution. It doesn't seem significantly smarter than the other group of species doing mating rituals themselves. They just have a neural network that reacts to certain input with this output that evolution created and honed through all this time of them being around such input and this output causing a better survival performance.
I didn't see anything specific that could've indicated they could learn new things in new situations, so it seems like built in neural networks that come to them rather than them having special smarts to learn new things like humans have.
> Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of 1-year-old humans.
I wonder about conclusions like these. I don't know about 1-year-old humans, but it's understandable that they can measure strength levels depending on the amount of whatever they are observing and if situations change they should recalculate their new decision. I just don't think it's a sense of numbers, it would be more like some sort of amount of input (pheromones, image, whatever) that makes them pay attention that something has changed.
And all in all it seems odd conclusion to compare sense of numbers based on that to 1-year-old humans. Trying to compare it to something, but the way they use those "skills" doesn't really make comparative sense.
[+] [-] falsaberN1|4 years ago|reply
I had never seen a jumping spider in real life, and its behavior was really fascinating. It refused to climb on my hand until the very end, and would wander around, like checking out the place, in a way that looked more like a very weird lost puppy with too many legs, than a bug. After a couple tries it attempted to resist further attempts by putting a recognizable warning stance, so I instead tried to tap my finger on the table to make it run on the opposite direction. After a couple taps it must have realized my bluff and just stared at the finger, confident it won't get hit. In the end it kinda reluctantly climbed my hand and before I was even near the window, it just jumped off like greased lightning and landed exactly where I wanted to put it (not literally, but it did land on the windowsill neatly), paced around a bit scanning the environment, then parachuted down to the street.
I always considered spiders relatively intelligent, specially compared to pests like the mosquito, whose only smarts seem to involve picking the worst time to show up, but otherwise behave like a crappy biological robot (the toy type not even the industrial type). But the way that jumping spider moved and behaved reminded me a lot more of how mammals and birds behave when put in an unknown place and being bothered by a human. I wonder if there's some relation to their eyesight. I wonder if that increases their awareness of what is what. Surely its brain has to be a bit more developed for visual processing, so perhaps that development has side effects in just making them smarter overall?
I could be falling into the usual trapping of humanizing its behavior, but it really seemed like I was dealing with a very weird-looking mouse or bird than an arachnid. It surely gave the most resistance out of all the spiders I encountered, which just happily climbed my hand and took the train to exitville, but that little bugger seemed to be aware of all the standard bug-herding tricks. I even wonder if it only allowed me to take it near the window because it decided it was where it wanted to go after scanning the environment enough. It might not have known I was taking it towards the window, but it seemed to realize that whatever I was doing, I was giving it a vantage point to reach the window with a jump given the direction I tried to take it in previous attempts before it escaped, which perhaps indicates some degree of abstract thinking?
I'm honestly fascinated about this, so if any of you is an entomologist or arachnid expert I'd like to know a more educated opinion. If I recall correctly jumping spiders are active hunters (as opposed to passive hunters like web spiders), so it'd make sense if they had some ability to think ahead and make basic plans. I don't recognize the specific species this spider was, but it was around the size of my thumb nail, light-ish brown with no particular markings and the first segment of its legs was much wider (around triple the width) than the rest. The boxes came from the northwestern region of Spain, somewhere in Galicia. I thought it was kinda cute even if its head looked like a weird tank turret.
[+] [-] wombatmobile|4 years ago|reply
Then one day, as so many accounts here attest, we notice a spider or an animal cross our realm and see that we have things in common - the urge to protect and nurture our young; the drive for self preservation; the call of hunger or thirst.
We do this not just with insects and animals, but also with other people. That ability to shut out the recognition of other people’s basic needs and feelings helps us to prioritise our own families welfare, and to get ahead personally.
That’s all understandable and ok to an extent. Taken too far, we risk alienating ourselves from something richly rewarding and powerfully good - the fellowship of people, insects and animals we haven’t met yet.
[+] [-] rob_c|4 years ago|reply
Spiders on drugs gives interesting results too, although when I was in school these were being used as part of a "drugs will destroy your life" message... (sun link I know, but worth a google): https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/6818187/nasa-spider-webs-drugs...