Ogre-faced Spiders hunt using Sound

Do you like spiders?

Well, to tell you the truth i don't like them at all but inside of me lies deep hate for the mosquitos. That's why i at least i acknowledge spiders as they are helping me and all of you get rid of those noisy little things.

Today i got a really interesting study to discuss. You see most of us if not all, till now thought that these spiders find their prey with their eyes. Especially, spiders that either have big eyes and many of them should hunt like this.

But the reality is a little bit different and I'll explain everything don't worry! I'll do the talking you do the commenting and upvoting!

What is an Ogre-faced Spider

An ogre Faced Spider or a gladiator spider (Deinopis spinosa) can be found around the world in tropic environments. It belongs to the family of cribellate and all the spiders belonging to that family have stick-like appearance.

So now it's important to let you know of how they hunt. So these spiders sit upside down like a bat and form a small net in their hands. They have 2 different hunting methods. If something comes in front of them then forward the net on it, like they wanna crush it

The magnificent thing is the second method in which if something flies from behind they turn over and catch it with the net.

So now the scientists wondered, how the hell did that spider sees the insect behind? Can they hear?

Can Spiders Hear?

We got the question, now we need to find the answers. The scientists from Cornell University took 13 ogre-faced spiders and put microelectrodes into the brains. Then played different tones of frequencies and wrote down the results.

They discovered that the spiders can sense airborne sounds between 100 and 10,000 hertz, though not at every frequency while humans hear between 20 Hz and 20,000 hertz.

After that, the team tried to conduct the same experiment in the wild. The sample was 25 and 13 of them reacted exactly the same in frequences of 150/400/750 hertz. Basically, they hear in low frequencies and they hear by using their legs in which there is a certain organ, called slit sensilla that respond to sound vibrations

The amazing thing is that they not actually use their hearing to hunt because these low frequencies are identical to the ones many of their predators sound. In other words, they may evolve like this to listen to their predators along with their prey!

isn't it amazing how little do we know? how much more we can learn?

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Posted with STEMGeeks