Smart Spider Builds Fake Spiders

reply to post by Starling


Thank you very nicely said, and I unexpectedly understand exactly where you are coming from. Thankfully we still have plenty of people like you who have not lost touch and will likely be the torches that bring us all home in the end.

Originally posted by Lonewulph

Originally posted by Pirateninjah
The idea of this is terrifying! So glad you posted, though. When I read that, I immediatley wondered if it was making a companion. If spiders know what spiders look like, they have to have some sort of intelligence, right?

edit on 19-12-2012 by Pirateninjah because: grammar

Interesting perspective...
This type of spider must know what it looks like...

How do they mirror themselves without a mirror

Imagine you never had access to a mirror, throughout your entire life. Would you not know your form?

I can see my arms and legs with my eyes. I would assume that spiders can also do the same.

reply to post by Wide-Eyes

Good point, dependent on their field of view, they have no neck to pivot their head...eyes on top...mmmm

reply to post by Lonewulph


Ok, I can feel my form by touching an arm or a leg against other limbs. A spider can do that too.

That is really cool to see.
It reminds me of a cave painting.
I'm amazed at the idea that a spider might create this and also 'recognize' it.

reply to post by Lonewulph
Hiya, I started a thread without seeing yours...I'm glad I've never told a member to 'use the search function!'

Kneel Before My Spidery Majesty and Cower!!

A spider has been discovered in the Peruvian Amazon that makes a dummy spider and then hides out of sight whilst plucking the threads to make it dance. It's a little bit like a performer with a puppet on strings.

Clever little killer

The discoverer is an entomology graduate, Phil Torres , and you can read more about it here at Wired and here on his blog.

From afar, it appears to be a medium sized spider about an inch across, possibly dead and dried out, hanging in the center of a spider web along the side of the trail. Nothing too out of the ordinary for the Amazon. As you approach, the spider starts to wobble quickly forward and back, letting you know this spider is, in fact, alive.

Step in even closer and things start to get weird- that spider form you were looking at is actually made up of tiny bits of leaf, debris, and dead insects. The confusion sets in. How can something be constructed to look like a spider, how is it moving, and what kind of creature made this!?

Before I bore you all with my thoughts, it's fair to say that until specimens are shipped back and studied, the critters remain 'unofficial.'

Torres thinks the giant spider decoy is there to dissuade predators like birds and he's the entomologist so who the heck am I to argue?! Thing is, wouldn't a large , moving spider scare away the prey as well as the predators? Maybe it's there to attract a spider-eater not repel them?



What strikes me with these tiny (5mm) critters is the question of how on earth they became so instrumental on their environment? Web-building can be traced back for millions of years and yet creating these dummies seems more novel and makes me wonder about their capacity for thought. Now I'm not suggesting they sit around scratching their little spider chins and coming up with Wily Coyote master-plans. Rather, I wonder at what point a spider accidentally formed something spidery-looking from web-trash and then saw the benefit of repeating the accident?

Isn't there some inferred thought-process that runs along the lines of 2+2 = ???

How about backwards? I mean, if the accident of spider-shaped debris was successful, wouldn't the single spider have to recognise the success and then think back about what it had done to repeat it? And then, the other spiders would have to evaluate the success and repeat it by copying too.

So I had a quick look at how many neurons a spider could be packing to compare it to some other clever critter and see how smart they could be.

Spiders that hunt spiders are the sinister geeks of the bug-world and pack much more capacity for intelligence than their couch-potato, web-lurking cousins. So we find a smart-ass jumping spider with ~600 000 neurons. More than ants and fewer than a honey bee although all three are examples of complex behaviours.

As ever, it's never so simple as matching number of neurons to intelligence or levels of complex behaviour – they can only be suggestive and rarely final. So we have a whale brain with ~200 billion neurons and their human counterparts with only ~85 billion in comparison. We could argue over which is the more intelligent...

Anyway, I'm drifting away from my point here....sentience!! Over the years we've seen humans as the single gold-medalist on a podium of its own. God's glorious creation or evolution's pinnacle! Slowly but surely we've given silver medals to primates (oragutan right >), monkeys and elephants. Now we've tossed a few bronzes to the smarter birds too.

To me this implies there is some sort of scale at play. We'd likely expect the sentient awareness of a bonobo to be a lot less than ours. Maybe less 'clear' or somehow not as bright? So I wonder at what level of brightness a spider's awareness of its world might be? Bright enough to copy the behaviour of others and smart enough to repeat an action that has a positive outcome?

Some would argue that natural selection created the rules and these 8-legged scuttlers and bedroom terrorists are just machines following a basic code. However I'm not as sure about the weight of the role of natural selection in this case. It's suggestive of learned behaviour and that points a finger at some dull flicker of self-awareness.

reply to post by Kandinsky


It's a real shame you put so much effort in to that and now barely anyone has read it.

reply to post by Kandinsky


Hi thanks for adding your post, I'm glad your efforts won't go completely unnoticed.
I had originally posted this in the science forum, but a mod moved it to the 'chit chat' forum (??)

It's certainly an amazing discovery in the arachnid world and fun to talk about the possibilities. I especially like your alternative take on the the little guy's intentions:

Torres thinks the giant spider decoy is there to dissuade predators like birds and he's the entomologist so who the heck am I to argue?! Thing is, wouldn't a large , moving spider scare away the prey as well as the predators? Maybe it's there to attract a spider-eater not repel them?

I would add that I hope the tiny spider is careful what it wishes for... Putting up a huge 'lure' like that might haul in a catch more than it can handle, (bird?.... Badger?)

I hope we are treated to more on the research which might help narrow down exactly how much this little guy is aware of and what he is up to.

Great post... I only found it via the Cryptozoology Forum.

If Spiders can do this I fear the worst!

Originally posted by manmental

If Spiders can do this I fear the worst!

Yes," I fear the worst," is what I thought when I encountered this article....I'm comforted however, that I will most likely be long gone by the time these little guys evolve to an intellectual level of something that might entrap me on my way to the grocery store.

This is one of the coolest things I've seen..what a cleaver little creepy spider ! peace,sugarcookie1

reply to post by Lonewulph


Absolutely amazing never seen this before thanks for posting.

I am going to study this a bit indepth.