Is that kind of information passed down genetically and if so, how does that work exactly? It seems easier to explain instinctive behaviors in other animals but weaving a perfectly geometric web seems so advanced it’s hard to fathom how that level of knowledge can simply be inherited genetically. Is there something science is missing?
In: 1829
There are a few interesting comments on here about spiders on drugs messing up their webs in interesting ways, but you don’t need anything that dramatic to see what’s going on.
Just find a spider at night while it’s spinning the web and mess it up with a stick. One of two things will happen;
If you do it gently enough so the spider doesn’t run away, then it will just keep plugging along, doing the steps in order, and end up with half a web, probably all misshapen because half of their reference points got destroyed.
Or, if it does run away and comes back later, then it will start all over again from the beginning. They can’t pick up where they left off, even if they only had 1 or 2 lines left to install, because they don’t know how. To them it’s just “make web.” So when they come back, that’s what they do. “Make web.”
The spider isn’t “thinking” about what it’s doing. It can’t problem-solve on the fly or improvise a creative solution to a new problem. It doesn’t have a list of 1000 individual steps memorized that it can adjust to the situation or pick up walkway through. It’s just “make web.”
computer science approach: from reverse engineering animal instinctual behaviors, there a good chance nature packs the web design into a few simple rules/behaviors that when repeated result in complex structures…
flocking birds and schooling fish work by maintaining about average distance to neatby members of the group and heading in about the average direction of all the members surrounding you… yea, they’re all doing the same, and their other instincts still steer or override sometimes, but that just cascades through the group and back to the original member and you end up with huge beautiful mumurations of starlings or swirling “bait balls” of anchovies in the ocean without any member attempting to form a structure.
so, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it were just a combination of a few simple rules like “keep threads on my left at the distance of me longest leg on that side” and “don’t go more than a few body lengths before attaching to something”
This is a great question because it has a simple premise but the answer would be a revelation.
Perhaps we don’t give spiders credit for an instinctual understanding of physics and self awareness per say. In example, across most land species we know not to run off a cliff. We would fall down and die, it’s just known.
In the same way if building a simple crossing over said cliff to some other side, we would analyze stick length, cross section, curve and overall integrity for strength and stability. Placement angle is also important.
Perhaps these considerations are natural to conscious beings and not limited to humans. Why? They are also quite fundamental to the universe so why not?
Spiders injected with LSD can no longer make nicely designed webs. My HS textbook in the 1980s showed a comparison.
[The main thing is that despite looking complicated, making a web only takes a handful of actions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Sq7-_G-TA). It is actually a pretty simple process.
This is hypothetical musings, but what does the spider experience?
It starts off by using a few strands to prop up and connect the main structure. By doing the first few strands it knows how tall/wide it is, and it starts roughly in the middle. Then it spirals from a center point, using its own arms/legs as measurements and knowing the width between adjacent spirals it can easily continue a spiral without any worry about having to know or understand the whole structure.
So possibly the spider evolved to: i) find a rough area it can spin a web in, ii) set and connect support lines, iii) find roughly the center, and iv) keep the spiral consistent.
I’m guessing that all of these steps have a learning curve with spiders, but given they spin one every day, it’s something they improve very quickly, we just don’t see the learning process.
If you were actually 5: There are things you learn and there are things you’re taught. You don’t *know* where to put your eyebrows or your fingernails, but to a spider, that might look like you were doing it on purpose.
This is a quote from a biology professor I had in college. “We will never understand that which allows us to understand.”
Friend and I were talking about this once. Neither of us are experts so let me just start with that. But apparently spiders will build the frame of their webs, testing the strength of the architecture, before filling it in with webs. This is extremely advanced and abstract frontal-cortex thinking, if we saw an ape or another mammal do this we’d be highly impressed, but because spiders are so small and unhuman-like we don’t give it much thought
The same way that ducks and elephants know to line up or migrating birds know to fly in a V formation. Cascading reflexes. When there’s nothing to react to they do one thing that puts things in a certain configuration and then they react to that configuration.
In the case of spiders that configuration is a bunch of threads crossing eachother in the center of a area which they then react to by spiraling that point while laying down thread.
There’s something similar going on with humans and crowds preventing them from getting in eachothers way, which I believe can malfunction and result in that thing where two people try to get out of eachothers way in a door frame and end up undoing eachothers effort, and malls and other retail business have even organized their product layout for the express purpose of tricking this reflex into making you go passed as many of their products as you reasonably can.
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