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Spiders are much smarter than you think

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Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think

#91

Post by malshe »

bryans wrote: post #18

A 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…

This is such an incredible story! It also made me emotional. Thanks for sharing it.

Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think

#93

Post by stoned »

bryans wrote: post #18

A 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…

There is a Russian (Eastern European? Slavic?) superstition against kill spiders. You can kill insects all day, but you don’t kill spiders. You just leave them be.

Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think

#94

Post by resonious »

nickpeterson wrote: post #53
birksherty wrote: post #45

Earlier 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/

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.

I can't speak for spiders but there are plenty of animals that do horrible things for reasons other than eating and surviving. Seals come to mind (with what they do to penguins). Also cats.

At the very least, mammals will kill for sport and for status. The biggest difference with humans is scale.

Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think

#95

Post by agustif »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #77
Levitz wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

> Cats play with their food oh my cat don't even eat the animals it brings back inside the house. Birds, baby rabbits (these ones survives for it can catch them but not kill them), lizards by the metric ton, spiders, mice... It brings them back to me and let them in the living room. Sometimes I get two animals a day. I don't know: maybe the cat understood we do the cooking and somehow thinks we're going to cook all i…

That last mouse instead of mouth was appropiate/funny I guess!

Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think

#96

Post by iscrewyou »

agumonkey wrote: post #24
bryans wrote: post #18

A 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…

There's something that gets to me anytime I see animals with their offsprings. A documentary about octopuses last moments in life, really shook me. It might be interpretation/anthropomorphism but anyway, apparently after laying eggs, the octo mom will breath out water (warmed by her body) around them. The process lasts a while and when she's exhausted she spends the remaining energy to swim as far as possible and die…

You’ll also love this radiolab episode then: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/octom...

I don’t want to spoil it but it’s quite a story.

Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think

#97

Post by kevincox »

tdrdt wrote: post #26

I 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.

Personally I just closed the tab when the SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER dialog obscured the article. I didn't expect to get much value from the content anyways so can't be bothered to deal with their crap.

Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think

#98

Post by pvaldes »

AwaAwa wrote: post #59
Levitz wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

> skinned while still conscious because the stun mechanism could, eventually, fail.

And all those grand pianos falling over the poor cat again and again...

Oh sorry, we were talking about the real life, or in terms of a cartoon possibility?

Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think

#99

Post by mewpmewp2 »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #79
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #37

What do we consider smarts? For example, with some examples there, like pretending to do a mating ritual for another group of spiders in order to lure the female out, this seems like it's something built in to their neural networks through thousands of years of evolution. It doesn't seem significantly smarter than the other group of species doing mating rituals themselves. They just have a neural network that reacts…

Human social interaction is also something built into their neural networks through thousands of years of evolution too. They have a neural network that reacts to certain input with this output that evolution created as well. Of course, biological neural networks are self learning too, so the output gets tuned and optimized in situ just a little. But there's really no difference in that sense. Sure: you shouldn't ant…

Yeah, agreed, but I think one of the highest differentiations for whether someone or something is intelligent is how it learns about new unseen concepts and can use intelligence to adapt to a completely new environment.

E.g. if that spider species was put to a completely different environment and during its lifetime it could learn to adapt to some new species mating ritual and fake out their female as well.

This would make me consider the title to be valid "spiders are much smarter than you think".

Re: Spiders are much smarter than you think

#100

Post by bryans »

lux wrote: post #85
bryans wrote: post #18

A 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 mo…

I had to do the exact same thing once -- the mother ran off as I tried to gather her and the sac into a box -- and you could see both the panic as she watched the sac being taken away, and the relief when she was reunited.
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