In a thread about spiders on high-rise buildings, somebody posted a quote from the website of Chicago’s Field Muesum which reads in part:
What struck me about this quote was the use of the word “delicious.” It seems overly anthropomorphic to me, but in an effort to give the Field’s curators the benefit of the doubt, I’ll pose the question.
Do spiders have anything resembling taste buds, or the necessary cognitive function to deem something “delicious”?
For that matter, if there were two different kinds of insects trapped in a web, of similar size and proximity, are there any factors that would attract a spider to one over the other?
As I understood it, spiders wrap their prey up and inject them with fluid that basically disintegrates the innards…I don’t think there would be much to ‘taste’ after all that.
As to the other part of the question…from personal experience watching webs, spiders will go for whichever prey is closer on the web. If they’re equidistant, I’m sure he’ll get to them both eventually.
“Open-ended hair-like setae at the ends of the legs and pedipalps serve as taste receptors. Spiders will avoid pungent or acidic substances upon contact. An adult spider can have over 1,000 contact chemoreceptors, or taste hairs, on the tarsal segments of its legs. These contact chemoreceptors probably enable the spider to tell good-tasting prey from bad and enable males to detect female pheromones that may be deposited in their silk.”
While imperfect, taste receptors exist to distinguish between edible vs. inedible. Anything on the edge will tend to taste “bad”. In that sense, spiders can distinguish between delicious and non.
But they probably don’t have the same idea as humans that variety is more exciting or that particular mixtures of foods is good. A spider’s sense of taste could probably be considered to be more like the difference between getting a massage or getting stabbed – there aren’t nuances, just good and bad, and a greyscale between.