Spiders are much smarter than you think

I was unpacking some computers we rented to a winery a few weeks ago, and all the boxes came with a different type of spider. My assistant is a young intern and just insisted on killing them (grave mistake, he got some sort of allergic reaction from that stupidity), while I just preferred to take them out the window and let them go (I don't want to hurt them but I don't want them to take residence inside our storage machines, cleaning the webbing is barely registrable as work, but I don't want them to get crushed with the fans or something. Guess I'm a softie at heart.) Anyway just that simple action shows you a lot about spiders. Some types just climbed on my hand and took the trip to the windowsill without any complaints, or they just somehow climbed off on their own with that parachute of theirs at the exact time I was intending to place them down. Others are more reluctant and they have to be running in a direction for them to climb. However, the most interesting of them was a jumping spider that was trying to make its home inside a crappy HP office computer.

I had never seen a jumping spider in real life, and its behavior was really fascinating. It refused to climb on my hand until the very end, and would wander around, like checking out the place, in a way that looked more like a very weird lost puppy with too many legs, than a bug. After a couple tries it attempted to resist further attempts by putting a recognizable warning stance, so I instead tried to tap my finger on the table to make it run on the opposite direction. After a couple taps it must have realized my bluff and just stared at the finger, confident it won't get hit. In the end it kinda reluctantly climbed my hand and before I was even near the window, it just jumped off like greased lightning and landed exactly where I wanted to put it (not literally, but it did land on the windowsill neatly), paced around a bit scanning the environment, then parachuted down to the street.

I always considered spiders relatively intelligent, specially compared to pests like the mosquito, whose only smarts seem to involve picking the worst time to show up, but otherwise behave like a crappy biological robot (the toy type not even the industrial type). But the way that jumping spider moved and behaved reminded me a lot more of how mammals and birds behave when put in an unknown place and being bothered by a human. I wonder if there's some relation to their eyesight. I wonder if that increases their awareness of what is what. Surely its brain has to be a bit more developed for visual processing, so perhaps that development has side effects in just making them smarter overall?

I could be falling into the usual trapping of humanizing its behavior, but it really seemed like I was dealing with a very weird-looking mouse or bird than an arachnid. It surely gave the most resistance out of all the spiders I encountered, which just happily climbed my hand and took the train to exitville, but that little bugger seemed to be aware of all the standard bug-herding tricks. I even wonder if it only allowed me to take it near the window because it decided it was where it wanted to go after scanning the environment enough. It might not have known I was taking it towards the window, but it seemed to realize that whatever I was doing, I was giving it a vantage point to reach the window with a jump given the direction I tried to take it in previous attempts before it escaped, which perhaps indicates some degree of abstract thinking?

I'm honestly fascinated about this, so if any of you is an entomologist or arachnid expert I'd like to know a more educated opinion. If I recall correctly jumping spiders are active hunters (as opposed to passive hunters like web spiders), so it'd make sense if they had some ability to think ahead and make basic plans. I don't recognize the specific species this spider was, but it was around the size of my thumb nail, light-ish brown with no particular markings and the first segment of its legs was much wider (around triple the width) than the rest. The boxes came from the northwestern region of Spain, somewhere in Galicia. I thought it was kinda cute even if its head looked like a weird tank turret.

While neural networks themselves are fantastic, are those species anything smarter than that? There's so much to learn from them yes, but I don't think based on this article that spiders would be "smarter than you think".

I don't think they are necessary self-conscious in an intelligent way. I think all of this behaviour can be explained from evolution honing them to have some sort of biases and weights towards this input causing that output.

And it's absolutely fascinating to learn to understand how they became to be the way they are. How environment affected, how all of it was stored in DNA so it can't be reproduced continuously and continuously.

I think level of spider's intelligence doesn't differ that much from what Tesla FSD is for example. Tesla FSD needs quite a bit of honing still of course.

We have an influx of Joro spiders in our area (N/Central GA), and they are absolute nightmare fuel. I can't have them in my porch or where people are going to be; their webs are big and sticky, but I'm having a hard time bringing myself to killing them.

> What do we consider smarts?

I read one of the papers were they experiment with Portia spiders (it might have been shared here on HN months ago). The paper actually went in great details to catalogue the kinds of intelligence being studied (it didn't invent anything, it was a good recap of the literature) and to design experiments to fit the portias in this hierarchy. It was quite good.

It’s amazing how they are all over now with the first spotting being around 2015.. They look crazy but as far as I know they aren’t harmful to humans.