Spiders are much smarter than you think
knowablemagazine.org
knowablemagazine.org
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.
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 don’t want to spoil it but it’s quite a story.
And on topic, I hate small house insects. They bother the hell out of me. So, spiders I treat very well and while not welcoming them in, when discovered I'll find them a new home outside rather than kill them. But then, I don't live in Australia..
It was fascinating how the octopus seemed to have trust and opened up to him.
Disagreed with his reasoning when she was being attacked - if she’s a friend, help her. Sitting back and recording her getting hurt because he didn’t want to “interfere with the natural processes” didn’t make much sense.
This has actually eliminated much of my arachnophobia, since I find myself studying the spider, safely confined inside the glass before letting it out. (This is actually one way they treat phobias clinically, a kind of desensitization exercise)
With that I can easily pick them up and drop them out the window or whatever. You can do it at well over arms' length too. It doesn't seem to harm them, as there's a space within the grabbing cage that they get directed to. Small spiders can crawl out between the cage bits but usually stay on the end long enough to move them elsewhere. Big spiders are fully caught.
> "It's fast, easy and eco-friendly!"
It's a piece of plastic that will be shipped halfway around the world, to do what could just as well be done by a glass and a bit of cardboard.
It might be fast, easy and particularly convenient, but "eco-friendly" it most certainly ain't.
Anyway, one day, I was hiking with friends, and someone pointed out I had a bug on me. I picked it up and realized it was a spider -- and then it dawned on me that I wasn't afraid of it at all. It was one of the most thrilling moments of my life to hold a spider without any fear at all. I started seeking out spiders to handle them. Even after I stopped taking that medication, the effects lasted. Nowadays I love spiders.
I learned years after stopping taking it that this medication has been studied both for PTSD and phobias -- specifically arachnophobia.
Your comment made me think to tell this story because I pretty much always attempted to bring spiders outside rather than kill them despite my fear. My rational side knew that most spiders are harmless, sensitive, and highly beneficial creatures. Plus I always hated killing anything and still do. But the exposure didn't actually reduce my fear of them noticably. And that experience is borne out in the research -- exposure therapy doesn't seem to be enough for most people
Apparently propranolol is effective because it works on memory consolidation -- more or less it helps with overwriting old negative memories (more specifically the emotional charge that accompanies the memory) with newer positive ones.
https://youtu.be/uO8pXtvxAA0?t=1893
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/a-drug-to-...
https://www.wemjournal.org/article/S1080-6032(97)70944-X/pdf
So I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
My understanding is that most people never see a brown recluse, even within their natural range. Those who do see them probably don't recognize them most of the time, because they're not especially big, because from a distance they look pretty much like any other brownish spider, and beause neither the human nor the spider generally want to get close enough to make a positive identification possible.
But it so happens that I've seen a lot of them, so I offer some trivia about that.
I saw hundreds when I was 12 and my father and brother and I were hired by a neighbor to tear down a shack on his property. It so happened that there were hundreds of recluses in the shack. I know because I was nerdy twelve-year-old with a fascination with wildlife and field guides, and I had a pretty nice little field guide with a good image and description of brown recluses.
I've seen many more of them in the house I live in now. I've been in this house for about fifteen years now. There are a lot of brown recluses living in it. I've seen many dozens of them over the years. The last time my daughter came to visit us, she found four or five of them during the week she was here. She's a little arachnophobic, but not too badly, and the experience hasn't diminished her enthusiasm for visiting We expect her to be back in a few months.
According to Wikipedia and other sources I've read, they rarely bite--generally only when they're being mashed against someone's skin hard enough to frighten them but not hard enough to kill them. When they do bite, it rarely causes any symptoms. When it produces symptoms, they're usually minor--most often sores on the skin; less often some necrosis of the skin.
The bite _can_ cause much more serious symptoms, but that's rare.
I had a bite once living here that might have been from a brown recluse. My doctor was skeptical, because the bite didn't look quite right. It produced a small, tender sore and a really large inflamed area around it. I didn't notice it at all until a relative noticed it on my back. That's consistent with reports of brown recluse bites: most often people don't feel the bite when it happens. Their fangs are quite small--usually they aren't able to pierce fabric--and the venom itself is painless; it's the later effects--if any--that become painful.
At any rate, I and my relatives seem to have reconciled ourselves to living with a large infestation of brown recluses.
It’s more the erratic, jittery movements of spiders and their multitude of fast legs that’s off-putting.
Especially when you’re taking a dump in a dimly-lit outdoor toilet and notice there’s a hand-sized huntsman spider a few inches from your knees. I have never sprinted so fast.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Carson-Quick-Release-Catching-Magnifi...
Wait until the spider is stationary. Put the glass on its side with the mouth directly in front of the spider. Then - tickle the spider's behind. Invariably the spider will panic-run forward, right into the glass. Lift the glass and there you have it! Spiders can't climb the smooth sides so no lid necessary.
I have found that persuading the spider to enter the glass without tickling its behind to be much more challenging for some reason. They sense the trap, or at least that it's a sterile dead end. But startle them, and they'll always run forward in a straight line.
Hopefully when you say "get rid of it," that means gently coaxing them into a box and putting them outside.
Nature is beautiful but let's not pretend it's caring or loving. Cats play with their food. Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out. Crabs eat their newborn offspring. Do any of these feel bad at all about it? No.
Find me an animal who went vegan because of empathy.
Add to that the kosher/halal slaughter.
This idea that all humanity is 'above' base animal behavior is as ridiculous as stating that all animals lack behaviors that we may label as empathy.
We are clearly demons.
And all those grand pianos falling over the poor cat again and again...
Oh sorry, we were talking about the real life, or in terms of a cartoon possibility?
There is absolutely push/incentive to monitor and correct for failures in stunning. The stress response it entails in the animal makes for poor quality meat, or even inedible meat that would have to thrown out.
Also, stunning is followed by slaughtering and draining. There is no situation in industrial production in which an animal would be dismembered and skinned alive.
Experiencing this horror, I decided there and then that I will not eat meat and fish again to satisfy my tastebuds. It has been years since I left eating meat and fish. But even now when I see non-vegetarian dishes(at home or other places) I have urge to eat non-veg. It is very difficult to leave eating non-veg; it is like addiction. But everytime I have that urge to eat non-veg, that scene from the meat shop plays in front of my eyes. It is very painful.
Another scene that I regularly see in my local area every morning is when cattles are transported in a truck to a near-by mass slaughter house. The trucks are enclosed from all sides with just a slit open for the cattles to look outside so that they do not panic in the metal enclosure. Looking at their eyes one can easily see that they are trying to understand where they are and what is happening. And everytime I see that I say to myself, these unsuspecting defenceless animals are going to face a gruesome death within an hour just to satisfy the appetite of some humans!
I would completely support requiring direct expert supervision of every single animal slaughtered. This is the norm at the smaller operations, but something like 80% of US cattle are slaughtered at giant Chinese owned factory stockyards.
oh my cat don't even eat the animals it brings back inside the house. Birds, baby rabbits (these ones survives for it can catch them but not kill them), lizards by the metric ton, spiders, mice...
It brings them back to me and let them in the living room.
Sometimes I get two animals a day.
I don't know: maybe the cat understood we do the cooking and somehow thinks we're going to cook all it brings back.
I remember an old blog where some coder who also had a relentless cat (I'd say at least 10 years ago) set up face a webcam and face recognition for its cat inside the pet door and wouldn't let the door open if the cat had something in its mouse.
I've got to find that blog post! Luckily my cats don't bring back half a dozen animals a day anymore but I'm still tired of chasing squirrels and mice around my house once a week.
Not every animal is like this. Most spider never kill animals they can't eat if they're not a threat to them. If one such creature falls into their web, they just release it.
>Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out
How else are they gonna eat? They don't have teeth with which to chew their food like we do.
>Cats play with their food.
Many cats can be sadistic selfish assholes, but somehow many humans love them to death because they're cute and fluffy.
And the flipside of focus is blindness. Ignorance.
One thing is focused upon, seen and controlled with vast depth and clarity. While 1000 other things are obliviated away.
That obliviated part. There's a lot of bad stuff going on there. (And a lot of good stuff too, no doubt)
Intellectual/scientific/technological culture is really the mind sitting around going nothing critical is going on let’s focus on something arbitrary. And if nothing critical happens for long enough you can start to assume that’s just how things are.
At the very least, mammals will kill for sport and for status. The biggest difference with humans is scale.
Seems like you glossed right over the most important part of their comment.
That's how predators act. Yet, we have no lack of love for birds and cats.
Anyway, don't group spiders on the "have no problem cannibalizing their offspring and mates". They are much more complex than that. Besides some vertebrates also have no problem doing that.
Given that neurotransmitters (adrenaline?) are so instrumental to regulating emotional state, that claim seems highly unlikely.
The most plausible possibility is that all multi-celled beings have some sense of family and parenthood.
And here with the spiders you are presented with evidence of such.
Does a mother spider feel distress with quite the same level of nuance as a mother human? Perhaps not. Is she clearly distressed? absolutely.
Just because you can't readily see the emotion, does not mean it is not there.
True to say that 'we don't know if they regret having to eat their young/mates', but saying they don't care is just as much making assumptions as saying they do regret it, merely switching the polarity.
It is also possible that eating the mate/being eaten is the most loving thing it can do, giving not only the DNA but also their entire stored energy for the good of the offspring. Or, they might be terrified. Or, they might not be sufficiently sentient to notice. Either way, what we know is that we don't know (tho there may be someone who's studied it enough, IDK).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571...
[Edit: I googled around, and this was an interesting article from Rod Crawford, the curator of arachnid collections at the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, Seattle talking about house spiders being traced back to Roman times. https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology... ]
Unfortunately, my wife is phobia level scared of spiders. So now if they bother her, by extension that is bothering me, and so I take measures to make sure they don't bother her.
But I motorbike commute every day with webs around my dash/handlebars. I wish my little spider bro good luck every ride.
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.
https://www.wsl.ch/en/2020/02/trees-pass-on-environmental-me...
I've killed a few, but I think I won't any more. Not necessarily because of this article, I just hate killing things.
I never knew of them before this fall until a friend of mine went on "removal" spree at his place, and now I've seen a lot more of them in my own yard.
One issue is we also have migrating hummingbirds, and the webs are big enough to foul them up. The spiders won't eat them of course, but I also can't have our hummingbirds dying over getting caught so I'll be knocking down webs in their area if I have to.
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.
Trees will form a network with the cooperation of fungi, to exchange information and nutrients among each other. Plants will grow better when they are planted with companion plant, or cultivated in guilds (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild_(ecology)
A few years ago I've been out, seeing blackberry bushes in full bloom, ripe with berries,
many already dropped to the ground. One could even smell them from dozens of meters away.
That was on a former industrial/commercial zone in the harbour, everything torn down,
leveled up a few meters with massive earthworks, compacted, graded.
Since a few years, no activity. Barren and bare execpt for a few weeds and bushes,
some colorful wild flowers, thistles(also very colorful!) some small birches. "pioneer plants" AFAIK.
Anyways, hords/squadrons of all sorts of insects swarmed around those bushes,
really darkening the air and making a loud buzz/hum/drone.
But strangely no birds.
Whatever, I wanted some of those blackberries, too!
So I thought about what I intended to do in terms of movements, actions, and so on, all visually,
and thought about projecting that outwards in crystal clear HYPER-IMAX-3D-whatever, for every single step,
slowly stepping into the swarm, thinking the same way about every hand movement, exactly from where I'd pluck the next one,
thinking don't sting or bite me, stay away from my face, there is enough for all of us...
And none have stung or bitten me, also they left me alone, with the exception of a few landing on my bare arms,
and resting there for a few moments, before taking off again.
But it seemed mostly unnecessary, because most of them seemed to be in a holding pattern,
waiting for space on the ground, to gorge themselves there on the juices of the fallen berries.
So I only needed to watch my steps.
The berries were exceptionally good :-)
I took about 1,5 to 2kg back home in foldable plasic bags, which I always have in my backpack for shopping.
But before doing that, I took my time, squatting down, and watching the bees, wasps, bumblebees, flies, whatever, flying erratically,
like they were drunken from the juices of the fallen to the ground berries, away, maybe a hand width above the ground.
That was their pattern, coming in high, going out low, like drunken. Still no stings or bites! :-)
One of the weirdest experiences I've had.
I'm still doing that with my cats, which I got later. Not speaking,
but thinking visually about things I'd like them to stop, and why,
what can be dangerous when I'm working in the kitchen, or soldering electronics,
how I like the ways they move, and so on.
We mostly communicate in silence.
Typical "catness" stubbornly ignoring everything aside, it feels like it's working in about 80 to 90%.
No stress with "herding cats" here. (3 of them)
Maybe we lost this stuff, the ability to perceive things like that, or it has been selectively bred out of us,
by the environments we created, which in turn shape us.
Back to topic (somehow):
Long before I got my cats, I had a 'stray' calico coming to me for about a month, from who knows where.
One night, while she was resting on a four times folded sleeping bag I'd layed out for her on my bed, I heard her loudly meowing.
No clue about what was going on because out of sight. I went there, and she stood on her hind legs, looking afraid,
slowly walking backwards into the farthest corner on her hind legs, meowing miserably.
At first I didn't get what was going on, then I saw a small spider, brown white, whith pale green backbody,
not larger than a pea, whole spider maybe an inch at maximum with fully extended legs.
The cat was terrified of that spider! Even when I've put the spider into a glass and thrown it out onto the balcony.
When I came back she still warily sniffed the spot from where I put the spider into the glass, meowing annoyed.
Took some time to soothe her.
I've never seen, or heard of cats being afraid of spiders before, nor I can imagine how that should work,
since outdoor cats should have plenty experience meeting them in the wild?!
In the visionary shamanic community, we might call these intelligences animal, plant, or insect teachers.
Spiders have a special, very profound medicine. Many beings are afraid of them, and moving through that fear is part of the test to learn from the spider teacher. There is something similar with snakes. The venom is transformative.
I noticed too that you talk about pioneer plants and you seemed to have skill at foraging. I’ll make a bold assertion that’s out of place for this forum: I think that a civilization that are organized around local food resiliency and sovereignty using such things as permaculture design can free up the time for humans to really explore consciousness. It requires time and awareness and not better machines and technology.
Feel free to contact me by email if continue this conversation interests you. Talktohosh on gmail.
One could also conclude the opposite. What we perceive as concious thought or emotion is just instinct.
Still, the urge for care ones young, while not necessarily very - cerebral? - at least creates a feeling of familiarity and connection - ie. empathy. When this empathy comes across from an arthropod to a higher mammal it's still humbling and awe inspiring, even though it might tell more of our autonomous nature than the intellect of the arhtropod.
I wouldn’t say what I experienced was much more than instinct and making a new web, but the emotional response of a mother protecting its young was relatable across very different species, which is useful for building empathy and respect.
The examples in the article are much more interesting from an intelligence standpoint though.
Pretty sure this is what doctors said as their justification for not using anesthetic on babies during medical procedures.
"Oh, they're just crying and screaming because baby, duh"
We now look back at that as being quite a barbaric practice/way of thinking.
This comment reminded me of a great book I read called Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves.
https://www.amazon.com/Mamas-Last-Hug-Animal-Emotions/dp/039...
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.
The Tower is a novel in which humankind has been reduced to slavery and outlawry by giant spiders in the far future.
I didn't know how the concept of universal consciousness could be expanded on much more after the first book, but wow was i wrong.
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.
- Spiders are much smarter than you think
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It's a pitty because it's a nice article.
- Spiders are smarter than you think
- Wow are they smart
- Here’s a scientist who says spiders are smart
- A lot of people don’t think spiders are smart but they are
They should just cut everything in the article before the part where they finally start describing some smart things the spiders do.
There is also a cool site that aggregates custom lists and allows you to search for specific filter-lists and narrow down choices by using filters on top. You can then subscribe to them directly - most are hosted on github. Just keep in mind some of them haven't been updated in years - you can preview them, and check their last update - in most of cases anyway. https://filterlists.com/
BTW there are filters specifically designed to remove newsletter-signup messages, popups, popunders, as well as general "annoyances" :)
there is also this you can enable with 1 click if you've got ublock already: https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
ps. Can’t find it anywhere, sorry.
"OTHER MINDS: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life" Godfrey-Smith
The last common ancestor between humans and octopus was a flatworm. So their intelligence has evolved comletely separately from ours in a totally different environment. So they are truly an alien intelligence, here on earth.
Coordinating complex movements is another one that appears to drive intelligence.
Vulnerability in a hostile environment. Together with foraging and coordinating complex movement plans, it is hypothesized that predation pressure when combined with the loss of their shell drove cephalopod intelligence. Trading defense for agility and int would also have provided a competitive advantage when competing for prey.
Human intelligence develops over a long period; imagine if it all had to be squeezed into 3 - 5 years.
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.
Spiders on LSD:
Anything roaming near the kids' bedrooms gets treated more harshly.
Cellar spiders are now my best friends. I didn't realize until then, but you can actually pick them up by hand and they don't bite if you're gentle.
I thought my kids not to be afraid of them and they handle them regularly. My wife is another matter and she has a very distinctive spider scream that I can hear from anywhere in the house.
Predictably, the BBC and David Attenborough have some amazing videos about them:
Hunting a spider - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDtlvZGmHYk
Hunting a mantid (you have to watch the end) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wKu13wmHog
Crazy mating ritual - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_udvnFCl7s
Another intense mating ritual - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQbScg3r1oQ
They let you pet them - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPo8MG1pJ8w
All of this with a brain of approximately 100,000 neurons.
Oh, well. It is a really cool clip nonetheless.
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.
Reading about animal cruelty makes me sick - we should be more like guardians than overlords. I suppose this will never sit well with a majority of people, especially if they have other things to worry about...
And related to the main topic, I've sat bored at work and watched a jumping spider prowl around the office. It was initial terrified of me, and would face directly towards my face and follow my head around to see what I was doing. When it eventually realized I wasn't a threat, it continued prowling. I watched it often stop, gauge a distance, and squat a few times trying to find the perfect angle and location from which it could successfully make a jump. Sometimes getting it perfect, and sometimes failing, pulling itself up by its web, and trying again. Learning through trial and error seems to definitely cross the bar of intelligent life for me.
It also later directly approached me (after having earlier avoided me) and started crawling on my hands as I typed.
Felt almost like meeting a thumbnail sized cat.
https://texashillcountry.com/wp-content/uploads/nature-1-660...
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.
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.
There is so much to learn from other species on our own planet.
I don't think they are necessary self-conscious in an intelligent way. I think all of this behaviour can be explained from evolution honing them to have some sort of biases and weights towards this input causing that output.
And it's absolutely fascinating to learn to understand how they became to be the way they are. How environment affected, how all of it was stored in DNA so it can't be reproduced continuously and continuously.
I think level of spider's intelligence doesn't differ that much from what Tesla FSD is for example. Tesla FSD needs quite a bit of honing still of course.
I read one of the papers were they experiment with Portia spiders (it might have been shared here on HN months ago). The paper actually went in great details to catalogue the kinds of intelligence being studied (it didn't invent anything, it was a good recap of the literature) and to design experiments to fit the portias in this hierarchy. It was quite good.
Of course, biological neural networks are self learning too, so the output gets tuned and optimized in situ just a little. But there's really no difference in that sense.
Sure: you shouldn't anthropomorphize lest you end up drawing completely wrong conclusions; this was drilled into me as well.
However, a strictly mechanistic view of something that is clearly software++ (biological neuroplasticity) might be overcompensating a bit too far in the other direction again.
I guess what I'm trying to say is try to treat each organism as their own thing. Don't overestimate or anthropomorphize; but don't take an over-linearized super-mechanistic view either, since that can lead you astray just as much.
E.g. if that spider species was put to a completely different environment and during its lifetime it could learn to adapt to some new species mating ritual and fake out their female as well.
This would make me consider the title to be valid "spiders are much smarter than you think".
> All species from the jumping spider genus Portia appear to be predators that specialize at preying on other spiders by invading webs and, through aggressive mimicry gaining dynamic fine control over the resident spider’s behavior. There is evidence that P. fimbriata, P. labiata and P. schultzi derive signals by trial and error. Here, we demonstrate that P. africana is another species that uses a trial and error, or generate and test, algorithm when deriving the aggressive-mimicry signals that will be appropriate in different predator–prey encounters.
It turns out that the species with more variation in encountered prey types are more likely to rely on search, varying over possible patterns until a response is received. Other papers show their ability to learn generalizes beyond mimicry of vibrational patterns. They are also capable of deriving and maintaining situation specific attack routes and plans.
I'll also argue that a fully instinctual repertoire, even without learning, should count as intelligence if flexibly deployed. Consider: despite an inability to learn or adjust, a Nash equilibrium approximating poker bot or an Alpha Zero neural network can be described as encompassing a deep instinct of the game that enables intelligent action selection.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10164-010-0258-5
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.
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.
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...
I was hoping to keep it around to see if it’d remember me when it became a moth, but after being kept in captivity for a couple days it showed signs of depression and I let it return to the wild. I hope to some day create an interesting enough enclosure to keep them mentally occupied for a full development cycle.
Shoutout to Ojo. Gone but not forgotten.
David Attenborough covered Portias in one of the documentaries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDtlvZGmHYk -- It's fascinating that they can strategize their attack.
Researchers are discovering surprising capabilities among a group of arachnids - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29066064 - Nov 2021 (24 comments)
Spiders are much smarter than you think - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29048443 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)
IMHO the big barrier for spider intelligence and technology is their solitary nature.
https://mindmatters.ai/2020/08/in-what-ways-are-spiders-inte...
I noticed about 10 mins after posting that the originating site in HN's list had changed from The Atlantic to Knowable, so I've been exploring its content, and like it.
Thanks to whichever mod is responsible for swapping the link. Also, the credit in The Atlantic was merely a link to Knowable's home page (which seems odd, really), so kudos to HN for thoroughness.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/spiders-...