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Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders
- odyssey7 3y agoAnimal intelligence will continue to be surprising for as long as animal exploitation remains mainstream.
- torstenvl 3y agoNow if we only engineered a retrovirus to uplift them into complex social structures and intelligence... https://a.co/d/85Wwwhi https://a.co/d/85Wwwhi
- pugworthy 3y agoJumping spiders are very cute though, and can dance - so I anticipate them being very friendly.
- serf 3y agoI wouldn't consider anything with that kind of dinner etiquette to be friendly if scaled up -- humans included.
- xarope 3y agoBianca? Portia? (minor spoiler to the books)
- torstenvl 3y agoThe OP refers specifically to the Portia genus. ; )
- lemmsjid 3y agoI just finished reading Children of Time and was indeed imagining that he was looking at earlier research on this subject, because the way he describes the spiders' initial thinking skills quite echos the article. It was very fun to read from that perspective!
- wonderwonder 3y agoloved the first 2 books, could not get through the 3rd
- codeulike 3y agoChildren of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is probably the best sci-fi I've read in the last 10 years. Its won the Arthur C Clarke award and recently the series (the other two books in the series are also great) won a Hugo
- nemo 3y agoAnyone who's watched jumpers hunt a while can see they're really clever little spiders. Always love finding them outside, they're little muppet spiders.
- jcims 3y agoNext time you see a jumping spider, interact with it. Try to coax it to you with slow repetitive movements. Get close to it. Tap and wiggle your fingers gently. You'll likely find that they come to you. They seem to be curious on a different level than any other spider that I've interacted with (which are all garden-variety spiders in north america). They do tend to freak out if you try to take their picture with a multi-lens phone camera...presumably because it looks like a set of robot spider eyes looking at them.
- nomel 3y agoThey're one of the only insects that show hunting behavior, as in pattern recognition and path planning [1], with brains so large that their esophagus has to go through it, to fit, with one of the largest brain to body rations of any animal. And, they dance [2]! Easily my favorite little critter. 1. https://roundglasssustain.com/species/portia-spiders https://roundglasssustain.com/species/portia-spiders 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qkzwG2lLPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qkzwG2lLPc
- apantel 3y agoI’m pretty sure my esophagus goes through my brain too… the way I think about food… Edit: I can also jump!
- nomel 3y agoYes, but does your esophagus get pulled out every time you shed? I think not! And, you have simple fixed zoom balls for eyes, where they have muscles that point little telescopes [3], that pivot at the eye hole, each with two lenses, allowing control of focus and magnification. 3. https://www.wired.com/2014/04/spider-vision-made-clear/ https://www.wired.com/2014/04/spider-vision-made-clear/
- wisemang 3y ago“He must mesmerize… or die!” Crazy video thanks for that.
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- pavelstoev 3y ago[flagged]
- JohnMakin 3y agoI think the scientific consensus for cognition and brain size has been for a long time that the size matters much less than we previously thought. For instance, ravens/crows show remarkable problem solving skills and intelligence on par with much larger animals and their brains are extremely small. Given how much meat we as a society consume, and how we treat animals generally, it makes sense that we'd collectively accept and yearn for a narrative that animals are dumb. I think science is steadily showing that this is not really the case.
- aulin 3y agoAnyone who's ever interacted with any kind of animal knows how they are intelligent. The lack of science on this matter is not the reason we still consume meat and more science won't change anything. We've always found ways to justify/accept our need for meat and wel'll continue doing this as long as science doesn't find an equally nutritious alternative that can be produced at scale.
- rickydroll 3y ago> Anyone who's ever interacted with any kind of animal knows how they are intelligent. Anyone who's ever had backyard chickens knows they are not intelligent. Nature gave them a brain to keep the spinal cord from fraying.
- psd1 3y agoI'm stealing that line! But chickens have a social order, keepers say, and more complex behaviour than a naive city slicker might expect. They may not be grandmasters, but they aren't completely stupid.
- rickydroll 3y agoThat line also applies to some management types and children of the rich and powerful.
- sph 3y ago
- adriand 3y agoI forget who said this or exactly what they said, but someone has pointed out that the more research humans conduct the more we find that animals and even plants are more complex, more intelligent and more sophisticated than we thought. It is worth keeping this in mind the next time someone tells you a small creature (perhaps a crustacean) cannot feel or think or do something that would mean we ought to be less cruel towards them.
- boringuser2 3y ago[flagged]
- ChatGTP 3y agoIn my opinion, many ancient cultures have known this for a long time. Of course the universe eats itself, everything seems to eat everything, that's natural, but having respect for this process is what I think we've lost. Driving a car through a bunch of mating insects? Who cares right?
- koolba 3y ago> Driving a car through a bunch of mating insects? Who cares right? That problem has been solved but not necessarily in a good way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon
- jjackson5324 3y agoThat's great, but if I ever see a jumping spider in my house then I will not hesitate to murder it in cold blood.
- refulgentis 3y agoThey're not what you think, they're less than 1 mm lol
- jjackson5324 3y ago
- rpmisms 3y agoI had a pet jumper in my first apartment. He would follow me and my wife from room to room, wave at us, and sit by the sink when he was thirsty. We gave him water and called him Steve.
- nomel 3y agoThere's a reasonable pet trade for them. I never had the heart to put one in a box though. The most interesting interaction I had was watching one hunt a fly. The fly landed, and it crawled down on the side of the board the fly was on, out of sight. It emerged behind the fly, then snuck up on it, similar to how a cat does (move, pause, move, pause). Then, when it attacked, it didn't jump at the fly, but jumped up in the air where the fly would be. It grabbed onto the flys back, then rotated, so the spider landed on its back, so the flys legs would be straight up, so it couldn't try to crawl away. It bit its neck area, waited a bit, then dragged it away. Really amazing, especially considering the fly was about the same size as the spider's body.
- AlexandrB 3y agoJumping spiders have definitely helped me get over arachnophobia a bit. They're just too cute to be afraid of.
- fhdkweig 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/@lucasthespider https://www.youtube.com/@lucasthespider Lucas the Spider is the cutest.
- CodewithBrown 3y agoHow so?
- AlexandrB 3y agoThey are small like another poster mentioned, but their big primary eyes and their behavior makes them seem a lot less threatening than other spiders as well. For example, if they notice you they tend to reposition themselves to get a better look at what you are. They are also pretty rare to find indoors, which means you're not likely to be surprised by them while brushing your teeth or taking a shower. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apWeH2f_uao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apWeH2f_uao
- carom 3y agoI saw a bold jumper [1] a few months ago and it was truly beautiful. It was quite large, black and white, and had iridescent mouthparts. It really felt like coming across a shiny Pokemon IRL. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phidippus_audax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phidippus_audax
- zer00eyz 3y agoThey are fairly common in the SF Bay Area. Not only are they cute (the have a fuzzy look about them) but they tend to eat the stuff we hate. I tend to have one or two in my back yard almost every summer. I could do with out the black widows
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoJust had to bop a black widow in my office a couple months back. I’ve been check the spot she had set up in every few days since, I will for years I bet. I played Grounded and I swear that game fucked me up.
- RespectYourself 3y agoYeah, these guys are cool! Found one on a cucumber in my garden last year. https://scontent-lax3-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/312364418_204957705339030_5060448449754151129_n.jpg?stp=c0.93.1440.1440a_dst-jpg_e35_s640x640_sh0.08&efg=eyJ2ZW5jb2RlX3RhZyI6ImltYWdlX3VybGdlbi4xNDQweDE2Mjcuc2RyIn0&_nc_ht=scontent-lax3-2.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=106&_nc_ohc=n5_ax268drgAX9Af8x_&edm=AOQ1c0wBAAAA&ccb=7-5&oh=00_AfD-IV2CCOIq-jq6WV-ddXct5MvW4lUOfj0Yq4xrSXglxA&oe=65B7192B&_nc_sid=8b3546 https://scontent-lax3-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/31236...
- jll29 3y ago...beautiful science: people spending a career on things like "how to surprise a [spider-eating, jumping] spider"
- palata 3y agoAgreed. I genuinely find this so much more meaningful than working on the next software buzz to help companies that are too big make even more money by tracking users even more.
- tomjakubowski 3y agoapropos of nothing to do with leaping arachnids -- if you do delight in the absurdity of specialties academics can find themselves in, check out the short novel Irregular Portuguese Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ianstormtaylor 3y agoThis is really interesting research. It’s fascinating to hear about how these experiments are designed in the first place. If anyone is interested in this topic, I highly, highly recommend the book “Ways of Being” by James Bridle. [0] It covers such a diverse range of ideas about intelligence, including neural network–style intelligences, that I think pretty much everyone would find something of interest. One of the takeaways is that these intelligence-seeking experiments have been poorly designed for so long, that they tend to reveal way more about the humans running the experiment than the animals being researched. And part of that is due to how uncomfortable we are with admitting that animals have completely different (not better or worse) ways of being and thinking than us. It makes you aware of the limitations of our hierarchy-and-comparison-based concepts. For example, even a simple phrase from this article: > Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of 1-year-old humans. The experiment doesn’t really prove that spiders can’t count, and surely if they did count it wouldn’t be by speaking out loud like we do. Saying that their faculties are equivalent to 1-year olds only really serves to diminish them. Not that I’m blaming the author, it’s just so easy to accidentally slip into these very limited ways of thinking. [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58772732 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58772732
- emsimot 3y agoDouglas Adams was right, the mice are experimenting on us
- ConorSheehan1 3y agoAs soon as it mentioned intelligent spiders I was thinking "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-time https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...
- keep320909 3y ago> The experiment doesn’t really prove that spiders can’t count There is very easy to prove spiders can count. They can tell bigger object from smaller, so they have some concept of measure and comparison. They can tell 10 is bigger than 2 and so on. The rest is only how precisely they can count.
- hhthrowaway1230 3y agoI always feel like these papers are excuses. Like: Whoops, we found out they are intelligent, while what really happend is that we over estimated our own intelligence and downplayed the lifeforms we can't understand.
- dinkleberg 3y agoOne of the craziest things to me when looking at a jumping spider is the unbelievable size and mass difference between us. An 80kg person is ~6,000,000x heavier than the average jumping spider. Whereas a blue whale is only like 2,000-3,000x heavier than that 80kg person (if I'm doing my math right). They are obviously tiny, but I wouldn't have imagined what titans we must be from their perspective.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tsimionescu 3y agoA thought I've sometimes had is that if we had evolved to be as tiny as something like these spiders, but still at our current level of intelligence and society, chimps or elephants or whales would still be almost insurmountable threats to us even with today's level of technology. It'd take entire nations years of effort to build a gun or rocket that could even hurt something that much bigger than us.
- Kinrany 3y agoNot clear, we might have ended up building industrial machines of roughly the same size. Elephants are soft compared to metal no matter how tiny the driver.
- tsimionescu 3y agoSure, but the tinier the worker, the more effort you need to build a machine of a certain size. Even today, most construction of any kind has significant manual work components. We are pretty good at building things hundreds of times bigger than ourselves, but I'm not sure we would be great at building something a million times bigger than a human. Of course this is not directly comparable, since we are often limited by materials science before raw manpower if attempting something like this; a 2km tall skyscraper is fundamentally harder to build than a 20m one regardless of the size of your workforce.
- huppeldepup 3y ago
- noman-land 3y agoThe more I learn about various living beings around us, the more I'm convinced that they are all unique, individual people, with unique opinions and desires. They have unique DNA and unique personalities. If you've ever spent an extended period of time with any animal, you know that they all have different personalities and opinions that differ from other animals of the same species, eerily similar to humans. They truly are different people. Some are shy. Some are gregarious. Some are brave. Some are lazy. Some are dumb. Some are mean. They're all different. I don't really know how to reconcile this feeling and I'm very much an omnivore but the thought is inescapable to me. In order for you to keep living, something with a unique personality, opinions, and desires has to die. And that includes plants.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoIs that moral justification for eating or stepping on the sentient being over the plant, just because they’re both alive?
- noman-land 3y agoIf anything it's moral justification for not doing that. I was pointing out how I kill living things in order to remain alive, even though I think they are unique individual people and it's troubling and confusing to me (because in order to live, another thing has to die).
- meowkit 3y agoUnsolicited, but I just abstract it to energy. I'm an energy well. They are an energy well. I can't hold off the march of entropy if I don't bring in more energy. So I absorb their well into mine. Until we figure out how to integrate photosynthesis / photovoltaics into our bodies its not worth stressing out over the necessary survival process of killing other living things.
- yreg 3y agoWell it is worth thinking about if one energy well suffers and the other one does not. We have very little reason to believe that a bean plant is sentient and experiences suffering to a comparable level like a factory-farmed chicken. It actually seems absurd. (I eat meat, this is not a holy war for me.)
- James_K 3y agoDo yall ever think there could be more practical uses for research money than doing IQ tests on jumping spiders? These results could well be made up. After all, you'd hate to be the guy who spends years studying spiders just to conclude that they're about as stupid as everyone thinks they are.
- wolverine876 3y ago> These results could well be made up. OK, so how can we analyze whether results are made up, partially made up, credible, etc.? > you'd hate to be the guy who spends years studying spiders just to conclude that they're about as stupid as everyone thinks they are. I'm sure people would hate to fund that too, or have their lab or university associated with it. How could they avoid it?
- James_K 3y ago> How could they avoid it? By making up results, obviously. That's exactly what I was saying the first time.
- wolverine876 3y agoThese are real questions that people have been thinking hard about, and finding solutions for, for centuries. It would be valuable to explore them, IMHO.
- James_K 3y agoThat's actually a good point. The spider people should have looked into this instead. Much better ROI if they could solve it. Maybe they could even incorporate jumping spiders somehow. It would be excellent marketing.
- wolverine876 3y agoYou are missing out on a rich, interesting world. Good luck.
- torbengee 3y agoUh-oh, I just read Children of Time ... and so it begins ... :-o
- notslow 3y agoSame. 8-o
- neuralspark 3y agoMy first thought as well!
- amoh14 3y agoMy fears are coming true ...
- bosquefrio 3y agoThe first time I ran into one of these cute little jumping spiders was in a backyard while I was reading a book. I felt something on my chair and moved and I saw something jump across to the small table next to me. I noticed that it was a spider. I didn't know spiders could jump like that. I was very surprised when it turned around and looked at me. Scrutinizing me. It literally was moving its head looking at me trying to figure out what had disturbed it. After that my girlfriend at the time joked that he was my little friend.
- wylielunaloki 3y agoI had a pet jumping spider that came to me one day. She was magical. She used to make artistic scribbles in the (sometimes) foggy glass of her terrarium. The she escaped one day (I always left a little crack open at the bottom of her home to give her the option of leaving) and I never saw her since.
- shoo 3y agopreviously: science fiction author Peter Watts' 2009 post musing about spider intelligence vs Turing machines: https://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem.html https://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem... > Here's the thumbnail sketch: we have here a spider who eats other spiders, who changes her foraging strategy on the fly, who resorts to trial and error techniques to lure prey into range. She will brave a full frontal assault against prey carrying an egg sac, but sneak up upon an unencumbered target of the same species. Many insects and arachnids are known for fairly complex behaviors (bumblebees are the proletarian's archetype; Sphex wasps are the cool grad-school example), but those behaviors are hardwired and inflexible. Portia here is not so rote: Portia improvises. > But it's not just this flexible behavioral repertoire that's so amazing. It's not the fact that somehow, this dumb little spider with its crude compound optics has visual acuity to rival a cat's (even though a cat's got orders of magnitude more neurons in one retina than our spider has in her whole damn head). It's not even the fact that this little beast can figure out a maze which entails recognizing prey, then figuring out an approach path along which that prey is not visible (i.e., the spider can't just keep her eyes on the ball: she has to develop and remember a search image), then follow her best-laid plans by memory including recognizing when she's made a wrong turn and retracing her steps, all the while out of sight of her target. No, the really amazing thing is how she does all this with a measly 600,000 neurons— how she pulls off cognitive feats that would challenge a mammal with seventy million or more. > She does it like a Turing Machine, one laborious step at a time. She does it like a Sinclair ZX-80: running one part of the system then another, because she doesn't have the circuitry to run both at once. She does it all sequentially, by timesharing. If you like this kind of thing, check out Watts' novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
- corethree 3y agoold news. I've seen articles on the intelligence of jumping spiders since the 1990s
- jongjong 3y agoI was bitten by a jumping spider when I was a child. I used to play with them, never had a problem and then one day for no reason, I got bitten.
- zabzonk 3y agoi do not believe it is possible to be bitten by a jumping spider (and most other spiders) - they are just too small.
- forgotmypw17 3y agoI was bitten by a cat. Many, many times. I used to play with a cat as a child, never had a problem, and then one day, for no reason, I got bitten. And it happened again and again! No complaints, would grow up with a cat again.
- jongjong 3y agoMe too but it was only a nibble.
- baerrie 3y agoThe moment you lock eyes with one of these you can tell they are thinking a bunch. There’s a certain recognition that humans can sense through eye connection that is quite instinctual
- 1letterunixname 3y agoOh, the anthropocentrism is strong here grasping at straws. It may also be just a genetically-imprinted fixed action pattern lacking strategic flexibility.
- gpderetta 3y agoScientists have been experimenting with portia spiders for a while and the surprising thing is specifically that a lot of their planning behavior does not seem to be hardwired. They can genuinely adopt to new preys and new environments and show learning behavior.
- Sparkyte 3y agoSpiders have always had some level of intelligence. Definitely not up there with mammals. Spiders react to different environmental factors and have to make decisions.
- paulmooreparks 3y agoJumping spiders are quite common here in Singapore, and occasionally one will wander across my monitor while I'm working. If I move the mouse cursor in a circle around it, it will turn and follow the cursor. Amazing little things. Generally, I have an irrational fear of spiders, but for some reason these little guys get a pass from me. They're fascinating.
- thebruce87m 3y agoThey are here in Scotland too, you’ll spot them mainly on windowsills. It’s one of the few creepy crawlies that actually seem to look directly at you.
- kuschkufan 3y agoThe misunderstood spider meme from 2013 comes to mind. Gosh, is that long ago: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/misunderstood-spider https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/misunderstood-spider
- asimovfan 3y agohttps://i.pinimg.com/736x/19/31/b1/1931b1494c90e78f15dc60c526330309.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/19/31/b1/1931b1494c90e78f15dc60c52... Also this one
- sph 3y agoI stopped bothering cellar spiders I found in my house after one morning a fly woke me up and proceeded to land on a spiderweb behind the radiator. They are welcome guests now. The larger ones though I politely but firmly invite to leave.
- lakomen 3y agoThat must be the dumbest title I've read in a longer while.
- adrian_b 3y agoI do not know where it is available, but there is a new documentary TV series: "A Real Bug's Life". Its first episode, "The Big City", includes many very beautiful filmed sequences with jumping spiders. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29520604/?ref_=ttep_ep1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29520604/?ref_=ttep_ep1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13919000/?ref_=tt_ov_inf https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13919000/?ref_=tt_ov_inf
- marojejian 3y agoPeacock spider's (a jumping spider) mating dance is one of my all time fav's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxM_cag99nU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxM_cag99nU