I read recently in a fascinating little book called, I believe, Mini-Monsters, that some species of spiders have shown to have rudimentary problem-solving skills. Is this true?
makes obligatory radioactive spider joke
We’ve had spiders smart enough to hide on the little black tiles of our black and white tile floor, after you take a swat at them. It makes them very hard to see.
I don’t know about problem solving though…
I’d have to question that; spiders are extraordinarily well adapted, but their responses seem to be pretty much autonomic. Spiders don’t really have brains in the geniune sense of the word; they have two nerve ganglia–roughly corresponding to the two brain hemispheres in other phylia–that provide impulse response but can scarcely be compared to brains in even the dumbest vertebrates or mollusca. They do display learning ability via aversion behavior, but so do flatworms. Conceptual problem solving ability (i.e. the ability to idealize a situation and calculate an optimal approach) is well and beyond any reasonable expectation of their abilities.
Spiders are very cool biomechanical machines, and I love watching them at work, but they aren’t going to be winning any Nobel Prizes, or even bumping the curve on the SAT.
Stranger
Yes, some spiders are extraordinarily smart. I recall reading a science magazine article (probably Discover) about a certain species of spider which preys on other spiders. It would imitate the mating behaviour of the other spider to lure it out into the open where it was vulnerable to attack. Apparently it was able to learn and remember mating behaviours of species it had never before encountered.
Perhaps some resident arachnologist will know which spider I’m talking about and provide its full name.
I should add that I don’t remember whether the spider learned from trial and error or from watching authentic matings. But in either case it’s impressive that it would remember the mating behaviour and subsequently use it to capture prey. Some of the behaviour learned was pretty complex, as I remember… it can range from plucking web strings in a certain pattern to dancing to waving its arms in a certain way to combinations of these. Sorry for the lack of a precise cite, but as I said, the magazine was most likely an issue of Discover between 1997 and 1999.
The spider is of course famous for making sticky spider webs to catch flies and other bugs for food. These webs are very ellaborate and it is interesting to watch a spider making these creations.
This is called INSTINCT. The spider knows how to make a web, it does not have to think about it. I doubt that spiders have any real analytical reasoning, but I have been a dick and set flame to a web and the spider knows to run away from the fire. If you don’t kill the spider (spiders are good creatures that keep the flies and skeeters at bay), the spider will just say “$HIt!” in Spiderese and just go to make another web. it has no choice in the matter, Instinct again.
When I was younger, I was homeless for a short time in San Francisco. I hung out with the bums and winos from Height Ashbury and one young yet truly alcoholic fellow did something he called “Spidering” which was to pick up a discared drink (mostly beer bottles left outside by clubbers) and consume the contents. Yum!
I remember seeing something on Discovery, I think it was, where they had a contraption set up to test the “thinking” ability of spiders. It basically looked like a large tuning fork elevated off the floor. At the end of one tine, they placed a fly, and nothing on the other tine. The spider was placed at the beginning of the “handle” and observed to see if it would work out the best way to get to the fly. And it did, repeatedly, take the correct path to get to the fly. Sounds sort of basic, I guess, but it’s pretty impressive considering that upon reaching the handle, the spider had to work out whether it should go left or right to get to a fly that was vaguely in front of him.
I remember when I was a kid I asked my father, “How do spiders know to make webs around electric lights to catch moths when they don’t know what electric lights are?”
Never did get an answer.
Found a little bit of info on the Portia, which is supposedly one of the best problem-solving spider around:
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/beh/2001/00000138/00000010/art00002
Sorry, included a colon in my second link:
http://www.amonline.net.au/factsheets/portia.htm
Now that seeing the name has refreshed my memory, I can confirm that Portia is the spider I was talking about in my previous posts.