There was a giant spider in a tree behind my house that never seemed to move. For a month I would greet him, Jeff, whenever I left or returned home. Since Jeff never seemed to move, I got to thinkin’. How do spiders work? Do they realize they are spiders and go straight to building a web to chill on, or is that only a response to hunger? After they build a web, what happens if they don’t catch anything? Do they abandon the web to find better real estate, or do they just sit there until they catch something or get caught; or starve to death?
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Not an expert by any means but I saw an r/biology post related to this so I may have some insight. Essentially what I got was spiders have brains about the size of a grain of salt, their ability to know where they are, whether it’s optimal and whether the risk/reward if their web location is worth it is far beyond the computing power of their brains. They operate mainly off of baked in biological instructions in their DNA, that basically says “find dark corner, build web, wait for food, eat”. If any one of those doesn’t go according to plan they don’t have much problem solving to avoid death. Natures solution to this was having them create 10,000 offspring so someone is a guarantee to succeed
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