But I already thought spiders were pretty smart. What is it now, they can do calculus too?
Spiders are much smarter than you think
81–90 of 220 posts
Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think
#82I get tired of reading from webpages like this. - Spiders are much smarter than you think - SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER - some text - YOU MAY ALSO LIKE - some text - Shutterstock image with a big description - ... Context switching is hard for the brain. Even in readabilty mode I get substracted by the image descriptions. It's a pitty because it's a nice article.
And then they just keep saying over and over:
- Spiders are smarter than you think
- Wow are they smart
- Here’s a scientist who says spiders are smart
- A lot of people don’t think spiders are smart but they are
They should just cut everything in the article before the part where they finally start describing some smart things the spiders do.
Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
No species can come even close to humans in killing others without any hesitation. Have you even seen the documentary Earthlings? http://www.nationearth.com/
Oh please. Animals don't even have the empathy to outright kill a prey before eating it and will have it dismembered, bleeding out and alive no problem. Nature is beautiful but let's not pretend it's caring or loving. Cats play with their food. Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out. Crabs eat their newborn offspring. Do any of these feel bad at all about it? No. Find me an animal who went vega…
Exactly, they don't have empathy. We have conscience yet we all these. So who is lacking empathy emotion tell me. We do much worse than any animal can do. Again go watch the docu to see completely to know what we do before replying. Humans are worst thing in universe because we do all these having conscience.
Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh please. Animals don't even have the empathy to outright kill a prey before eating it and will have it dismembered, bleeding out and alive no problem. Nature is beautiful but let's not pretend it's caring or loving. Cats play with their food. Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out. Crabs eat their newborn offspring. Do any of these feel bad at all about it? No. Find me an animal who went vega…
Human industrial slaughter where animals are trussed up and dismembered and skinned while still conscious (granted due to failures in the stun mechanism, but there isn't much push to monitor assembly line failures) would beg to differ. Or how about male chicks being liquefied and fed back to the chickens? Add to that the kosher/halal slaughter. This idea that all humanity is 'above' base animal behavior is as ridicul…
People don't like hearing truth they don't like, so they downvote.
Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think
#85A couple years ago I had an experience with a spider that entirely changed my perspective on them and most insects, and now I make a conscious effort to help them as much as possible, instead of kill or even repel them. This particular spider kept running back and forth between my monitor and a window, and when it'd get to my monitor, it would wave its front legs at me. If I moved to the left, it would run across to…
I had a similar experience with a spider who had made an egg sack in a precarious spot along our back door that was definitely in hazard's way. I got a stick and a leaf and tried to detach and move her setup to a nearby spot that would be safer. She did not like that.
At one point in the move, she got left behind and I ended up with just the egg sack to move. You could feel the panic and protective instinct in her movements. I got her onto the leaf and reunited with her eggs on a nearby plant and she quickly went to work finding the right spot and securing her sack to the underside of one of its leaves.
I watched her there for a while in her new location, and there is absolutely more than just instinct at play.
I didn't grow up liking spiders much, but gardening in particular has given me a new perspective on them. One measure of our garden's health is the amount of spiders we see, keeping other would-be pests in check.
Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think
#86One of my school friends walked a different path from me and became a paramedic. He used to have to go to homes in "socioeconomically challenged areas" in order to revive people who had taken substances that they should not have taken - and also other things which were even less good. On one of these trips in a drug hell hole he saw a tank with a spider in it, and he realised that these people were likely mistreating…
I've seen similar behavior from garden spiders that I've taken inside before winter. They are afraid at first but eventually warm up to me and let me pet them. Spiders are very cool creatures. An analog of human intelligence, as unique as octopi.
Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the horrifying thing about humans is we do understand what we’re doing and choose to do it anyways. Spiders kill things to eat them to survive. Humans do it for much more complicated or arbitrary reasons.
Our whole intellectual/scientific/technological culture is founded upon our ability to focus our attention . And the flipside of focus is blindness. Ignorance. One thing is focused upon, seen and controlled with vast depth and clarity. While 1000 other things are obliviated away. That obliviated part. There's a lot of bad stuff going on there. (And a lot of good stuff too, no doubt)
Attention isn’t binary. Stubbing your toe is a great way to pay a lot of attention to something you normally ignore, but conversely we are paying attention to the lack of pain without it diverting any effort.
Intellectual/scientific/technological culture is really the mind sitting around going nothing critical is going on let’s focus on something arbitrary. And if nothing critical happens for long enough you can start to assume that’s just how things are.
Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our whole intellectual/scientific/technological culture is founded upon our ability to focus our attention . And the flipside of focus is blindness. Ignorance. One thing is focused upon, seen and controlled with vast depth and clarity. While 1000 other things are obliviated away. That obliviated part. There's a lot of bad stuff going on there. (And a lot of good stuff too, no doubt)
Attention isn’t binary. Stubbing your toe is a great way to pay a lot of attention to something you normally ignore, but conversely we are paying attention to the lack of pain without it diverting any effort. Intellectual/scientific/technological culture is really the mind sitting around going nothing critical is going on let’s focus on something arbitrary. And if nothing critical happens for long enough you can star…
Yes, distraction is a thing. And oblivious focus is also a thing. Both are aspects of attention.
Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
People with arachnophobia should remember that 95% of the extant spiders are totally unable to pierce the human skin. Fangs too weak or short to reach blood capillaries and made any real damage, even if they would be poisonous doesn't matter. Those that coevolved with spider-eating monkeys are the problematic ones.
So there's still 5% of spiders that can pierce your skin and inject stuff? That's not very reassuring
According to this report, you have roughly 1 in 50 million chance of death by spider.
https://www.wemjournal.org/article/S1080-6032(97)70944-X/pdf
So I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
No species can come even close to humans in killing others without any hesitation. Have you even seen the documentary Earthlings? http://www.nationearth.com/
Oh please. Animals don't even have the empathy to outright kill a prey before eating it and will have it dismembered, bleeding out and alive no problem. Nature is beautiful but let's not pretend it's caring or loving. Cats play with their food. Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out. Crabs eat their newborn offspring. Do any of these feel bad at all about it? No. Find me an animal who went vega…
> Animals don't even have the empathy to outright kill a prey before eating it and will have it dismembered, bleeding out and alive no problem.
Not every animal is like this. Most spider never kill animals they can't eat if they're not a threat to them. If one such creature falls into their web, they just release it.
>Spiders liquefy their preys, melting them from the inside out
How else are they gonna eat? They don't have teeth with which to chew their food like we do.
>Cats play with their food.
Many cats can be sadistic selfish assholes, but somehow many humans love them to death because they're cute and fluffy.