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Untangling Spider Biology

sciencemag.org

43 pointssergeant314 comments

As an arachnophobia Something about looking at spiders really disturbs me at some fundamental level. but I'm extremely fascinated by their biology still. Is anyone else similar?

You should read Children of Time.

Yes, someone is similar. Utterly fascinating. Spooks the shit out of me. My take is, this is too widely shared a phobia not to have some solid genetic underpinning.

You might be on to something! http://www.cbs.mpg.de/Fear-of-spiders-and-snakes-is-deeply-e...

There's a concept in psychology called preparedness which suggests that we are biologically prepared to learn certain things. I don't have time to track down the actual research, but I remember reading years ago about an experiment with monkeys. They had been born and raised in captivity and had never encountered any environmental dangers. The researchers paired images of flowers and a harmless, but unpleasant, electric shock, or images of snakes and the shock. After many trials the monkeys learned to fear images of flowers. It took very few trials for them to begin fearing images of snakes.

I'm sure I'm not doing justice to the concept or the research, but those are the very basics of it.

In theses parts it would be incredibly difficult to find a spider that would technically be able to hurt a human (or any bigger mammal, like a cat or a dog); yet many humans (especially females) are scared shitless of spiders. I've never understood that, to me spiders are a net positive, since they eat annoying insects (like flies).

Perhaps these deeply-rooted fears stem from times were humans lived in places far more dangerous, with far more potent spiders and snakes.

(Snakes don't even exist here, but legless lizards do, and people are of course scared of them; that kind of lizard won't even attempt to bite something as big as a human, and as usual, they are useful animals to have around).

The exact same. I read the whole article but averted my eyes and quickly scrolled past all the images

I used to be incapable of approaching even the thinnest spiders.

For a reason, now I don't scream in terror if one reaches my bed. Last summer I even drove one outside in a tiny plastic wrap, no harm was done.

I'm still surprised at the loss of fear and even the slight curiosity about their biology.

It's a weird binary thing for me. And not fully under my control. It's like one of those perceptual illusions - sometimes I can stare at them with pleasant fascination, other times it's more a reflex "kill it with fire!"

And it's not just based on shape, color or what it's doing, either.

I think what terrifys us are monkey reflexes from dangerous animals. Spiders can be poisonous. I guess not being afraid of spiders is the actual defect, heavily trained in at youth.

To be honest, i find cellaphods really freaky. A octopus for example- is the perfect creature for space exploration. If it weren't for us, they would inherit the earth.

It's so interesting how genetics and data science are changing taxonomy. Instead of biologists classifying species into families and the like based on observable attributes, now we are seeing computers do the classification with experts forming theories about why the results turned out a certain way.

For any other HNers that are fascinated by this stuff, I really enjoyed Barth's Neurobiology of Arachnids.

$100 (bargain price from Amazon) for the paperback is going it a bit.

Huh, yeah. Totally agreed. I picked it up for about $35 for the hardback.

I've got a category of semi-rare books that I'd put this in if I didn't already have it. The price bots on Amazon, etc. don't really know how to handle them, so the prices fluctuate quite a bit. I've literally seen a book drop from $330 to under $10 in a day.

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