Some days you try so hard to put your head down and get your work done, only to be distracted or interrupted by somebody making a bunch of noise.
Spiders know just how you feel, and a new scientific paper finds that arachnids in louder environments build their webs differently than those where it’s quiet.
The study out of the University of Nebraska- Lincoln centered on the Pennsylvania grass spider, also known as funnel-weaving spiders.
They build webs like many spiders do, but they don’t rely on stickiness to catch prey.
Instead, the spiders sense vibrations in their webs, which alert them to nearby insects that they could catch for a meal.
The researchers wanted to find out how noise from the environment might affect that process.
So they brought funnel-weaving spiders to the lab, some from quieter rural areas, and some from louder urban areas.
Then they put the spiders in containers connected to speakers.
For four days they either got loud sounds, like the ones in the cities, or quiet sounds, like the ones in the country.
And the study found that the type of noise these spiders heard affected the types of webs they made.
Rural spiders confronted with the extra noise made their webs more sensitive to vibration, sort of like turning up the volume on your phone when the person you called is talking really quietly.
The urban spiders did something very different in the louder environment: they essentially soundproofed their webs, designing them in a way that muffled the extra vibrations.
The scientists think that might keep these spiders from getting overstimulated while trying to catch prey, sort of like turning down a phone when the person on the other end is so loud, you can’t really understand what they’re saying.
The scientists want to learn more about how the spiders make these changes in their webs; is the silk itself different? Are they changing the web design? Is there something else going on?
And no doubt they’ll want to know just how much extra noise convinces a spider to knock on the neighbor’s door and tell them to turn it down already!?!
Not so long ago Dan Martin was interning at a film archive on Long Island when he started going through a big pile of old donations.
In that pile: five film cans containing a movie called The Heart of Lincoln, which had been made in 1915 and that researchers had long thought was lost!
And the film reels were in such good shape that they’ve digitized it and put it online!
Getting Annoyed at Your Noisy Neighbor? Spiders Are, Too. New Research Finds They’ll Build Webs Differently in Loud Conditions (Smithsonian)
Long-Lost Silent Film About Abraham Lincoln Discovered by an Intern (My Modern Met)
