Little spider makes big-spider-puppet CLONE of itself out of dirt
Meet the adroit arachnid that makes a decoy “spider” in its web to mislead predators – and jiggles the strands like a puppet master to make the miniature marionette move. No, really, that's according to conservation biologist Phil Torres, anyway. His full story is here, the spider is apparently alive and well in the Amazon, and …
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Re: So, presumably
"that would suggest that arachnophobia isn't restricted to just human beings"
Well, its more likely that the sort of creature that would be interested in eating a 5mm spider might be a bit put off by one several times larger, and continue on its way. A predator that might be keen to eat a spider of either size will be more likely to go for the larger one, giving the real one an opportunity to make itself scarce.
Re: So, presumably
Indeed, some countries have bird-eating spiders (though that is in part due to the small size of some birds in some parts of this ever-surprising world).
Hmm, it might not be that the predator is threatened by the big decoy 'spider', but rather chooses it as the bigger meal, giving the real spider a chance to escape.
Re: So, presumably
...especially if the decoy also attracts a mate somehow; either by direct "ooo there's a big strong mate" means, or by sexual selection, which as we know causes runaways in all kinds of arbitrary directions, if the *preference* as well as the attribute is heritable.
Re: So, presumably
Well spotted Hugo. The researches didn't mention it, but there are some advanced sexual behaviours in some species of spider. 'Dancing' on a web, for example... though it has been observed that some male spiders get it on with the female while their competitor is still showing off... all the gain for no pain (save being eaten alive by your mate). This is an example of biologists call 'sneaky fucker' behaviour. Please excuse the f-bomb, but seriously, that's what zoologists call it.
Re: So, presumably
@Martin, agreed. It's like the Japanese crabs that resemble Samurai warriors. Carl Sagan reckoned that's another example of selection, as Heikegani crabs that look like Samurai get thrown back in the sea! (This may or may not be true.) Anyway, here's some classic "Cosmos"!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hy0Bimyus4
Re: So, presumably
That's an interesting example of 'artificial'* selection, if true! The opposite could also be true (that Samurai, like many warriors around the world, take their inspiration from animals), as could a combination of the two processes.
*(Used to denote selection by humans... but since we humans are the product of natural selection, some argue that our actions are natural, and thus should we ever colonise Mars, that life on Mars would also be natural. Bah, tis nowt but semantics!)
Re: So, presumably
The textbook example of this happening in short time scale is that of moths in England over the historical period known as the Industrial Revolution. Moths (nocturnal, so inactive during daylight) would rest against the bark of trees, appropriately camouflaged to the species of tree they preferred. Soot from the burning of coal ('dark satanic mills') darkened the appearance of trees in many areas, and this placed a strong 'selection pressure' on generations of moths- favouring those that exhibited a mutation that made them darker. Pale moths would be readily seen by birds and promptly eaten.
This happened in decades, if not years. Moths, like spiders, have many, many offspring.
Sorry but you simply don't understand evolution. The much-vaunted moths example isn't evolution. It is simply a case where there were already two versions of the same organism, and changed circumstances suddenly made one of them at a severe disadvantage. That took months because both types already existed. That is natural selection, not evolution. An emergent new behaviour - from a regular spider to one which makes a fake spider - is a totally different proposition. This takes a LOT of time.
I was nowhere suggesting evolution doesn't occur by the way. Merely that some examples really make it seem that the long time scales are actually not that long at all when it is randomly driven.
Re: So, presumably
you simply don't understand evolution
He understands it quite a lot better than you, that's for sure.
Re: So, presumably
I don't think it needs self-knowledge
I'm not disagreeing with this, but I'm not sure you can completely rule out the idea that the spider is "deliberately" making something in its own self image. I'm not suggesting it has self-cognition (some insects and arachnids have brain cells running into the dozens, from what I read), but I don't think it's crazy to suggest that spiders can have a sense of proprioception (ie, knowing roughly where its limbs are) and that that might form the basis for setting up a feedback loop (from cybernetics) to explain the how of what it does, if not the why.
It would be pretty amazing to find that if could use visual information, but I'm guessing that proprioception could be a sufficient mechanism to explain it. It might even be possible to test the theory by filming the thing making the shape. If it makes leg waggles that correlate with the order that it builds the legs on the model then maybe the theory itself (to pardon the pun) has legs.
Just throwing this out there. IANAEB (I Am Not An Evolutionary Biologist).
ummm
Doesn't this indicate a certain amount of self awareness and spatial awareness in order to get the spatial dimensions in correct proportion?
After all, if the legs look to long in comparision to the bodies overall shape, then it would not be indicative of a spider, but instead of another creature perhaps.
This is just the first step, creating the "puppet" out of weak materials.
Next they will try harder materials like twigs.
Then they will use these to subjegate other animals that can work with harder materials and build the next version out of wood.
The wood puppets will subjegate stronger animals.
It will be a self perpetuating cycle where they subjegate stronger animals to build stronger "puppets" until they manage to create puppets out of steel and subjegate man.
As someone with severe arachnaphobia I fear our eventual spider overlords and say we burn them ... BURN THEM ALL NOW WHILE WE STILL CAN!!!!!
Re: ummm
Wait. Wait until they produce metallic silk.... indestructable giant spider puppets.
Then panic.
Re: ummm
Spider mech warrior? Where have I seen that before? [ insert JPG of that boss from Doom here]
Alas, mimicry as a survival tactic (birds that look like the plants they perch on, flowers that resemble female insects so that males 'mate' and thus pollinate them, hover-flies that look like wasps, butterflies that have large 'eyes' on their wings, stick insects that look like sticks...) arises from the successive selection of randomly occurring mutations.
+1 insightful (Re: ummm)
Mimicry - you nailed it. This is just a special case of it, where instead of making the body of the organism look like some other organism, evolution causes an artifact by the organism resemble another organism, which here happens to look like a bigger version of the original spider, because it turns out to be useful. No self-awareness needed.
Re: ummm
Doesn't this indicate a certain amount of self awareness and spatial awareness in order to get the spatial dimensions in correct proportion?No, it doesn't. You're bringing in advanced human concepts here. The spider doesn't need to know that what it is building looks like a spider. All it needs to know is that what it is building scares off predators. It so happens in this case that looking like a spider and scaring off predators are the same thing, is all.
After all, if the legs look to long in comparision to the bodies overall shape, then it would not be indicative of a spider, but instead of another creature perhaps.And the spider that built it would, in all probability, get eaten before it got a chance to pass on the genes for building poor-quality decoys.
That's really all it takes: Try lots of slightly-different things, keep the ones that work, throw away the ones that don't, and repeat over and over again.
Re: ummm
Yeah, just to clarify: 'Mimicry' applied to 'hover-fly looks like wasp' is not the same as a child mimicking their parent's turns of phrase. Mimicry in that sense does in nature- Mynah birds, parrots and song birds being easy examples.
Re: ummm
"All it needs to know is that what it is building scares off predators."
Just to clarify (I'm sure you're aware) that it doesn't need to 'know' anything (which is a good thing since it is just a spider afterall).
All it needs to do is behave according to how its genes dictate, and if it gets a small advantage over its peers in terms of becoming a reproductive sucess by behaving in this way, then these genes will over generations become more common and more refined within its species.
Re: ummm
If the spider is ALREADY scary, why would it need to build a second scary spider to erm scare stuff off?
So maybe it is lonely and has made itself a friend, partner, parent figure
or the scary spider scares prey away from the model into the real spiders path
or maybe it's a form of self or species worship made in its own image
Or maybe its doing gangnam style. until we see it set to music we can't really say.
We make snowmen, maybe spiders make dirt spiders.
Re: ummm
" The spider doesn't need to know that what it is building looks like a spider. All it needs to know is that what it is building scares off predators. "
So millions of years of evolution give the same result as the spider just standing in the web in the first place? That's certainly not an Intelligent Design :)
I wondered if the idea is it does not scare predators, but tricks them into eating the fake.
Re: ummm
> If the spider is ALREADY scary, why would it need to build a second scary spider to erm scare stuff off?
Except that the second spider is roughly 6 times the size of the first one. A cat 6 times the size of a house cat is a Siberian tiger*. Not exactly the same place in the food chain.
*if Wikipedia figures for average cat sizes are to be believed
from a lifelong arachnophobe
Two options that occur to me:
1) burn it with fire
2) nuke it from orbit (it's the only way to be sure)
Re: from a lifelong arachnophobe
Thats it man, game over man! its game over!
Re: from a lifelong arachnophobe
They're coming from under the God-damn bath!
Not so original
I do the same thing at work. From the far side of the room it looks like I'm hard at work in front of the computer. When the bosses come round I can wiggle and it even answers the phone!
Re: Not so original
You are Tracy from BabeStation and I claim my £5
Re: Not so original
You should build yourself a Pantograph (or a series of them) and connect it up to an oversized model of yourself. That should scare the bejesus out of the boss so he won't come around ever again.
Puppet or Muppet - you decide
I have heard that the UK parliament has tried a similar tactic, I don't know what Dave CamMoron calls it, but we call it a Clegg.
Re: Puppet or Muppet - you decide
I don't know which is more rib-tickling hilarious, the joke about the Clegg or the massively witty pun CamMoron.
Oh, actually, yes I do. Neither of them.
Re: Puppet or Muppet - you decide
And yet you took the time to reply, many thanks Martin
Re: Puppet or Muppet - you decide
Ha ha! You love Balls.
Mimicry!
This spider by luck or judgment has learned to mimic politicians, who often have scapegoats out front who appear to be doing something while the actual politician is up to something else in addition to string pulling.
Re: Mimicry!
Are you sure about that? I thought the politicians were the front men having their strings pulled.
Pace Mary Shelley
Burn it with fire or nuke it from orbit -- both excellent options.
But fear the day it is struck by lightning.
IT connection
This spider also can count. At least to 10 (octal).
Re: IT connection
IT connection:
On the web, no one really knows what you really look like.
Re: IT connection
Another IT connection:
Some spiders can up the resolution of the eyes by introducing vibrations to them. Imagine you took a photo, and then shifted the camera to the left by half the diameter of each CCD receptor... and then shifted it up by the same. You would have three images that could be interpolated to resolve more detail than any one single image. Some engineers have built cameras based on this principle.
Are they going to side with us or the insects?
Human slaves.......
Re: Are they going to side with us or the insects?
...in an insect nation!"
Here's one to Bill Bailey! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2mmTDT6W7E
Science...it's not fact
...its only a theory.
/Trolling to get down-voted in 5-4-3-......
Would have come in handy on the ark
It would have kept the other pairs of spiders away!
Saw plenty of spiders when I was there
But not this one, will have to go back!
Re: Counting spiders
Seems unlikely they could count to 8
Maybe they can count to 256?
After Torres found one specimen, they showed up like buses
It's good to see a footballer who isn't as dumb as a plank have something to fall back on.
I just don't understand... I thought that the purpose of a spider web was to catch prey, not to scare it off. Or maybe the spider knows that flies really don't know what a spider looks like (having always been eaten before they could talk...) and also knowing that big, lumbering humans will just blindly walk through their webs, (given several hundred thousand years of observation) causing them hours of hungry painful labour-intensive rebuilding of said web, and also knowing that said humans are 50 / 50 afraid of spiders, so build an image that will alert the big-lumbering lummox to the fact that he (or she) is about to have a close encounter of a spidery kind. In short, a true genius of an inventor, worthy of even more praise than its lowly engineering bretheren, for inventing a device that will save spider-dom countless hours of frustrating, painstaking, labourious web-building.
On another note, wonder what a spider looks like seen through a spider's eight eyes?
< the .50 referred to above...
and jiggles the strands like a puppet master
Could his name by any chance be George Soros?
It's a Trap
A tiny bird-eating spider is luring bigger spider-eating birds into its' web to entangle them and devour them at leisure.
Spiders (of all sizes) are crafty suckers
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