Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders

“He must mesmerize… or die!”

Crazy video thanks for that.

There's a reasonable pet trade for them. I never had the heart to put one in a box though.

The most interesting interaction I had was watching one hunt a fly. The fly landed, and it crawled down on the side of the board the fly was on, out of sight. It emerged behind the fly, then snuck up on it, similar to how a cat does (move, pause, move, pause). Then, when it attacked, it didn't jump at the fly, but jumped up in the air where the fly would be. It grabbed onto the flys back, then rotated, so the spider landed on its back, so the flys legs would be straight up, so it couldn't try to crawl away. It bit its neck area, waited a bit, then dragged it away. Really amazing, especially considering the fly was about the same size as the spider's body.

This is really interesting research. It’s fascinating to hear about how these experiments are designed in the first place.

If anyone is interested in this topic, I highly, highly recommend the book “Ways of Being” by James Bridle. [0]

It covers such a diverse range of ideas about intelligence, including neural network–style intelligences, that I think pretty much everyone would find something of interest.

One of the takeaways is that these intelligence-seeking experiments have been poorly designed for so long, that they tend to reveal way more about the humans running the experiment than the animals being researched. And part of that is due to how uncomfortable we are with admitting that animals have completely different (not better or worse) ways of being and thinking than us.

It makes you aware of the limitations of our hierarchy-and-comparison-based concepts. For example, even a simple phrase from this article:

> Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of 1-year-old humans.

The experiment doesn’t really prove that spiders can’t count, and surely if they did count it wouldn’t be by speaking out loud like we do. Saying that their faculties are equivalent to 1-year olds only really serves to diminish them. Not that I’m blaming the author, it’s just so easy to accidentally slip into these very limited ways of thinking.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58772732

One of the craziest things to me when looking at a jumping spider is the unbelievable size and mass difference between us. An 80kg person is ~6,000,000x heavier than the average jumping spider. Whereas a blue whale is only like 2,000-3,000x heavier than that 80kg person (if I'm doing my math right).

They are obviously tiny, but I wouldn't have imagined what titans we must be from their perspective.

Animal intelligence will continue to be surprising for as long as animal exploitation remains mainstream.