How the spider nets every movement of the eight legs

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University used night vision and artificial intelligence to track and record every movement of the spider's eight legs when working in the dark, and discovered exactly how spiders weave their webs-how this creature can create Such an elegant, complex and geometrically precise structure

"The first time I became interested in this topic was when my son and I were out bird watching.

For centuries, spiders that blindly weave webs based on touch alone have been fascinating

To understand how such animal architects’ “relatively small brains” support their high-level construction projects, the first step is to systematically record and analyze the behavior and motor skills involved, which has never been done before, mainly because of capturing And recording actions are quite challenging, Gordus said

Here, his team studied a furry ball-weaver spider, native to the western United States, small enough to sit comfortably on fingertips

"Even using video to record the work is very cumbersome and takes a long time.

They found that the web-forming behavior of all spiders was so similar that the researchers were able to predict where the spider would weave the web by observing the position of one leg

"Even though the final structure is slightly different, the rules for building the network are the same," Gordus said

The laboratory’s future work includes experiments with drugs that change the mind to determine which circuits in the spider’s brain are responsible for the various stages of network construction

"Spiders are fascinating," Korver said, "because this is an animal, its brain is built on the same basic building blocks as our humans.