Kim’s training allowed the researchers to operate in a controlled environment with high-speed cameras and 3D CT scans that captured the precise movements of the spider’s jumps.
Kim’s jumps, researchers can apply their findings to engineering micro-robots.
I do wish people would stop saying “I respect spiders and insects outdoors where they belong but IN MY HOME THEY MUST PAY WITH DEATH”
I mean the vast majority of them don’t want to be in your house either. They’re not “intruding.” They end up there because they got lost and for most species your house is a wasteland where they’re doomed to slowly starve or dehydrate.
If you can get close enough to one to smash it you can get close enough to one to trap it or sweep it back outside.
They even sell this neat thing now that can gently grab little delicate creatures when you pull the soft bristles shut
Woah! I bet you’re gonna get a lot of notes just like this dude, but I would love it if you could give me a name or something to look up for that product! I’d totally love to buy one!
I love bugs myself, but when I need to escort one outside, even though I’m not scared of touching them, I’m almost always super worried I might slip up and my big clumsy human fingers might accidentally injure them!
They call them “critter catchers” and they seem to go for around $15-20 online!
Here’s a comforting thought. When you arrive home and open the front door or enter your bedroom, the spiders can hear you.
It has long been known that spiders can hear sounds via leg hairs that bend in response to vibrations arriving through the air or through solid objects such as floors or walls. But until now, we thought they could only hear airborne vibrations a few centimetres or “spider lengths” away at most.
It now seems that this same approach actually lets them hear sounds up to 5 metres away.
Gil Menda at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and his colleagues were studying a type of jumping spider,Phidippus audax, that they assumed relied almost completely on sight and vibrations they can feel through other objects, such as leaves or floorboards.
But microelectrodes implanted in the spiders’ brains showed that neurons responded to sounds such as chairs scraping and people clapping even when the noises were made 3 to 5 metres away.
“We were very surprised,” says Menda. “Our studies extended the range of auditory sensitivity to more than 3 metres – over 350 body lengths – for our spiders.”
The team established that the spiders freeze when exposed to low-frequency sounds of about 80 to 400 hertz that resemble a low hum, or buzz. They discovered that this overlaps with the wingbeat frequency of predatory insects such as parasitoid wasps and flies, concluding that the hearing abilities they found in jumping spiders have evolved to help them avoid predators.
This makes it even LESS plausible that they would crawl in your mouth while you are sleeping, or bite you for any reason. You are a mountain that creates wind and thunder, they only want to avoid you.
WELL, to quote my former coworker who is an entomologist:
It’s not technically “hearing” as they have no ears or tympanic membranes but all the hairs sense changes in vibrational patterns. The fact that they can sense this and from such a distance is pretty amazing.
I am 100% sure that she is not a brown recluse, or even related to a brown recluse!
The misidentification of spiders is so common, and the misinformation spread about them by the media, hearsay, etc. all ends up with so many innocent spiders- who are totally harmless to humans and pets, being killed on the spot.
Unless you are an entomologist, keep spiders as a hobby, or have a special interest in spiders and their biology, you will probably be 100% wrong 100% of the time if you try to identify a spider.
Superficially, many spiders look the same. Similar colors, patterns, and they all have 8 legs right? But if you look closer there are many, many subtle signs that tell the species apart.
Leg shape, size, and how they hold them. Size of the cephalathorax relative to the abdomen can indicate gender as well as species. The size, shape, and arrangement of the eyes (which can sometimes only be seen with the help of a magnifying glass!). Where the spider was found is another helpful indicator.
So there are all these subtle things to help you identify a species, and unless you are really into spiders like I said… you’re probably wrong.
And I’d really like to address this whole “brown recluses are highly venomous” thing. Yes, their venom is hemotoxic. But bites that actually cause any medical symptoms are rare (yes, you can be bitten and NEVER KNOW IT) and ones that do actually tend to heal by themselves in a few days. And over 80% of problems that medical doctors diagnose as “brown recluse bites” are actually something else. Staph infections, herpes, lyme disease, etc. are all misdiagnosed by actually doctors as brown recluse bites, sometimes despite brown recluses not even living in that state (looking at you, California).
Most bites from brown recluse spiders (Loxosceles reclusa) are “dry” bites, meaning they don’t inject venom. Venom takes energy to create, and a spider might not want to spend energy creating more venom when they can just run away. Which they will try to do. They are not a particularly aggressive or defensive spider, and rarely bite humans. If they do, it is because they are pushed against the skin and feel threatened. And even then, they aren’t likely to inject any venom at all.
I’m not saying that no one has been harmed by them, I’m just saying that their danger has been greatly exaggerated by pretty much everybody.
SO onto my spider! I was looking around at work and now that I’m home I’m not 100% sure because the species I think she is is pretty variable with their pattern, but I’m almost certain that she is Pisaurina mira, a species of Nursery Web Spider. Why do I know for a fact that she isn’t a brown recluse and most likely a Pisaurina sp.? Because of her eyes!
These are the eyes of Loxosceles reclusa. There are three pairs of eyes, with 6 eyes total.
My spider has 8 eyes, in two rows. Unfortunately there is a peice of coco coir in front of half her face of the first picture, but you can clearly see there are not three pairs, and in the second photo you can see the entire top row.
And even just looking at the spider itself, they are pretty different in shape and pattern!
I’d kind of want to live in a house with 2,000 brown recluse spiders. Maybe black widows too. They’d be a great way to scare off door-to-door salespeople!
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