Where Bugs Meet Their Maker
Where Bugs Meet Their Maker
A new type of spidey-sense has been identified by scientists.
Jumping spiders have superb vision, as we already know. We already knew how good they were at detecting vibrations. We even knew they could “hear” from a great distance.
In a study published in Current Biology, Cornell University researchers discovered that a common species of jumping spider called Phidippus audax could hear from much farther away than previously thought — up to 10 feet.
“I’ve been working with these animals for a long time, but suddenly, we’ve realized that the world of this spider is completely different from what we thought,” says Paul Shamble, a Harvard fellow and co-author of the study. “We believed they were simply vibration and vision animals, but now we’ve learned they can hear as well.”
As Shamble points out, spiders don’t have ears. He claims that humans detect sound by picking up pressure waves, whereas these spiders appear to be able to “hear” because they have “specialized hairs that pick up the particle movement.”
“I’ve been working with these animals for a long time, but suddenly, we’ve realized that the world of this spider is completely different from what we thought,” says Paul Shamble, a Harvard fellow and co-author of the study. “We believed they were simply vibration and vision animals, but now we’ve learned they can hear as well.”
As Shamble points out, spiders don’t have ears. He claims that humans detect sound by picking up pressure waves, whereas these spiders appear to be able to “hear” because they have “specialized hairs that pick up the particle movement.”
He says that the researchers discovered this by chance. It all started with a happy chair squeak.
“We were doing this research on how the brains of jumping spiders interpret vision,” he continues, describing how they were able to hear neurons firing in a spider’s brain thanks to cutting-edge equipment. Gil Menda, Shamble’s co-author, was working in the lab when he backed up his chair, which squeaked loudly.
“When the neurons started firing, he thought, ‘Oh, that’s unusual,” Shamble said. Shamble clapped first, right next to the spider, to see if this was true. The neurons began to activate. Because they believed spiders could only “hear” at close range, he continued to back up, expecting the firing to cease.
“It just kept happening. I was standing outside in the lab, more than 3 meters away from the spider, clapping, and it was still happening,” he says. “It was an epiphany moment because based on what we thought we knew, this shouldn’t have been happening, yet it very obviously was,” she says.
Researchers observed the spiders’ responses to sounds through behavioral experiments and neural recordings in order to determine their specific responses; to test the spiders’ hearing.
When the spiders heard a low-frequency sound, they tended to “freeze” in place, which Shamble believes is an anti-predator response.
The neural recordings back up this theory because of the frequencies that spiders respond to “are relatively low and right in the range of frequencies for especially sort of largish flying insects,” according to Shamble. This implies that hearing could be used to detect predators like wasps.
He believes the “listening” capacity could have additional applications, pointing out that jumping spiders have “very intricate courtships.”
The experiment was set up to ensure that the spiders were responding to sound passing through the air rather than vibrations in the room.
In the United States, Phiddipus Audax and its relatives are among the most common types of jumping spiders. “Is this something unique to jumping spiders, or is this something that is sort of an undiscovered trait of all spiders?” Shamble says. He believes that it’s likely that other spiders are capable of doing the same thing.
The fact that spiders can detect sounds from such a vast distance changes our understanding of how they take in their surroundings.
It’s really exciting to come to understand that these creatures who have sort of lived alongside us all this time still have these little mysteries about how they perceive the world around them.
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