However web-building is encoded in the spider brain, it probably looks a lot like how dam-building is encoded in a beaver's brain, or nest-building in a bird's brain.įor a spider, that action sequence manifests as distinct stages of web-building.
Whatever the cognitive processes are behind these multistage behaviors, it's likely that they're mirrored across many categories of animals, Gordus said. "But we know that animals are capable of organizing in a higher order way." In studies of the animal mind, "a lot of work has focused on single behaviors, like a rat tapping a lever, or an animal engaging in sexual activity - single action sequences," said Andrew Gordus, a biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who oversaw the study. Web-building is just one example of a particularly complex feature of animal cognition, easy to study in spiders because of their relatively small brain size. To do this, a group of researchers catalogued and indexed the movements spiders use to build their webs and published the results in the journal Current Biology. Scientists have observed the same structural progression in this construction process with many spider species, though elements such as silk thickness and location vary greatly.Īfter centuries of fascination with the 2D webs created by a group of spiders known as orb-weavers, scientists are working to piece together what the pages of that intuitive instruction manual look like, and to understand what they can teach us about the animal mind.
It's a strategy that always works for them, almost as if spiders are born knowing only the steps of a choreographed dance - no pattern is revealed until it's finished. Unlike human architects, however, they start without the final plan in mind.
(Inside Science) - Like any good architect, an orb-weaving spider builds its residence in stages.
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