Spider Uses a Light Show to Trick Eager Male Fireflies into Its Web | Hacker News Reader

Spider Uses a Light Show to Trick Eager Male Fireflies into Its Web

nytimes.com

47 pointsclockworksoul32 comments

I love spiders!

Just kidding.

I block them by putting a transparent cup over them, slide an open book cover beneath where they stand, so that they must enter on top of it, close the book, and off we go - I, the book, the cup that I press with all my force, and the spider trapped inside - to the nearest opening in the building, wishing them the very best on their new way of life, outside, and for me to live and thrive.

In my apartment, and I swear this is not a joke, most of the time I use "NoSQL - A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence - Distilled", as my main transport mechanism.

Anyway, to the point. Similarly interesting behaviors of spiders include using web vibrations for communication and sensing, apparently even including tuning. You can easily google (is this still a cool way of saying "search"?) related articles, just ignore the web apps Vibrations API article on the MDN.

Any semi-stiff plane would do, the thinner the better so as not accidentally injure the little critter's legs and what-not. These days keep an unpeeled decal that has just the right thinness/stiffness properties.

Haha, wasn't expecting such a tip!

The problem is that if this plane is semi-stiff, it's hard to put your hand under it without making an opening between it and the glass. And that is not a risk I'm willing to take.

So the trick is that I slide something thin (the cover itself), but then can, as a second stage, put the rest of the book there, by closing it. But true, no reason those two layers must be a part of the same thing.

Today someone posted Show HN for a catalog of problems looking for better solutions. Maybe I should submit there?

> it's hard to put your hand under it without making an opening between it and the glass. And that is not a risk I'm willing to take.

TBF, for most of the spiders that we find in our homes, the risk is only psychological, not physical. That said, I prefer not to make physical contact. My nephew though, he plays with them like they are puppies.

Well, this is not even 1 mm thick. It's just 2 glossy papers that are held by the adhesive so the gap while I slip it under the glass is pretty minimal.

I use a cardboard coaster (e.g., from your local pub), which is necessarily cup-sized.

I feel like you guys need to discover the purpose-built tool for this: https://a.co/d/ixJoPRE

We keep these under every sink because they tend to appear in tubs for us. Only problem is spiders that run fast, it’s hard to capture them without injuring them.

I admire your dedication to preserving life in the face of discomfort! I personally use a two-tiered approach: if the spider inhabits the DMZ, they may persist unmolested. This includes most parts of the house where we aren't likely to come into physical contact. However, protected territories include my bed, my clothes, and pantry. Venturing into protected territory as an arachnid is, unfortunately, a capital crime.

I always found these types of things particularly creepy. Scaled up to human level, imagine a creature that trolls around luring you with visually-convincing mates only to eat you.

Bram Stoker's Dracula had a particularly good bodyhorror version of this in the multi-bodied "Woman".

You basically just described ads, although poetically (: Edit: after having read the article i want to change ads to "ads, influencers, and pyramid schemes"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimic_(film)

> Scaled up to human level, imagine a creature that trolls around luring you with visually-convincing mates only to eat you.

You mean like television ads showing scantily clad women to get you to spend all your income on <insert product here>? Looks like the spider learned from us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJWEJuKXZyk

If a spider is doing anything, there’s a safe bet that it’s been doing that thing for thousands or millions of years. Spiders are extremely successful and they’ve occupied countless niches as they’ve been around for 380 million years.

It was a joke. I don’t really believe (nor did I expect anyone to think that) spiders have been observing humans watching adverts on TV, following them around to understand the socio-economic ramifications of that, then hatching a plan to catch other insects based on observations.

Please don't upset the spergs. Just say. "Oh yeah, I didn't think of that". We need them to stay here to solve our SQL queries.

If you replace "eat you" by "financially ruin you", that's pretty much what pig butchering scams are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam

There's a great movie called Under the Skin about this very topic. Featuring Scarlett Johansson no less.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(2013_film)

When I saw it I also thought of the Australian beetles that hump beer bottles until they die, because the size, color, and texture of the beer bottle resemble a particularly sexy female beetle and they just can't help themselves.

there are many human males that turn to the bottle instead of women. Don't be so mean to the beetles!

>When I saw it I also thought of the Australian beetles that hump beer bottles until they die,

The human equivalent might be an AI generated image of woman(or man) so attractive they cant exist.

It's called a "superstimulus" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

And to add insult to injury, the decoy mate turns out to be a sucker like you mind-controlled to act like the very thing he was pursuing...

This reminds me of this sci-fi book called Children of Ruin where in a terraformed world, a genetics experiment goes wrong and the whole place is now overrun with super-intelligent giant spiders, who were infected with the uplift virus and have built their own civilization in the meantime — and who are protected from orbit by the immortal computer intelligence of Avrana Kern, who has determined in the intervening centuries, that she likes the spiders better than people... Nice reading! Recommended!

You might be interested in this Reddit post:

Imagining the psychology of aliens evolved from ambush predators

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16a9m2h/ima...

Enjoyed this post! ... thanks! ...

Sequel to Children of Time by the (great!) Adrian Tchaikovsky – middle book of a trilogy.

OP has it confused. They lay out the plot to Children of Time which is the first book but call it Children of Ruin. Ruin was the second book that focuses on something else (no spoilers). Time focuses on the spiders.

I don't know why Children of Ruin came to my mind instead of Children of Time, but I agreed that the first book is more focused in the spiders. I was told that there is already a third book that end that serie, Children of Memory, gotta read this one! ...

I'm old enough to know I'd be the first firefly in there and probably would take a friend down with me.

https://archive.is/s1atW

https://www.wussu.com/poems/lctlq.htm

This seems like a lot of complexity dedicated to a reward otherwise obtainable with less complexity.

In some universe somewhere there is a spider thinking the same thing watching a human use a microwave to prepare their food.

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