International Association of CyberPsychology, Training, and Rehabilitation

Spidey Sense: Way More Than Meets the Eye

Arachnids sense electromagnetic fields to gain a true “spidey-sense” by tailoring a web containing carefully crafted patterns of water and silk that efficiently conducts electricity.

The web threads are made of silk laced with special silk “droplets” swollen with water and a special chemical cocktail to function as a highly adhesive and water-attractant glue—a sticky trap also works as a water magnet, sucking humidity from all around. This concoction electrically charges the web and helps spiders catch their prey, according to a Naturwissenschaften study.

The study, a first to report on the electric twist on a spider’s arsenal to capture prey -- along with detailed explanations on how this mechanism works -- hinted at the electrical field manipulations spiders use to paraglide.

The researchers show how the webs cause tiny distortions in Earth’s electric field within a few millimeters of their location. This allows the web to literally spring toward prey as well as small charged particles in the atmosphere that spiders detect and use to conduct airborne maneuvers.

In addition, spider silk is highly sensitive, and can be tuned to different harmonics to allow spiders to “listen” to an electromagnet world. For example, moving the web in different ways produces wave harmonics that are distinct depending on oscillation angles perpendicular to emf fields.

As spiders interpret vibrations with organs on their legs called slit sensillae (small, hypersensitive grooves that deform with even the slightest disturbance) the data flowing through the silk clearly shows how the shape of spider webs are based upon both sonically-calibrated and electro-magnetically influenced design. The "sound of silk" is much more content-laden with signifiers that constitute a spider's extended reality. And according to the authors, such webs could also be used to monitor environmental pollution -- as they are as efficient as industrial sensors at detecting and capturing airborne pollutants -- such as pesticides.

I Can Fly I Can Fly I Can Fly!!! Spiders lack wings, but they can fly across entire oceans on these long strands of silk.

Yet, for well over a century, scientists thought it was merely wind lofting them, sometimes as high as a jet stream — in a process known as “ballooning.” A new study shows the Earth’s electric field is manipulated to propel these flying spiders too.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology (Jul 2018) found when spiders are in a chamber with no wind, but a small electric field, they are likely to prep for take-off, or even fly. Plus, the sensory hairs covering the spiders’ bodies move when the electric field is turned on — much like our own hair stands up due to static electricity. This “spidey sense” could be how the creatures know that it’s nearly 3,2,1 “lift-off” time.

As many humans lack the awareness to feel Earth’s electric field, its role in biology is routinely overlooked, thus making spiders only the second known arthropod species, after bees, to sense and use emf currents.

Scientists have long been aware air currents can lift spiders high into the air, but the idea an electric field can also pull on spider strands had been dismissed over 200 years ago. Specifically, when spiders sense an electric field, they stick their spinnerets into the air and release silk. Called “tiptoeing,” this means spiders are ready for take-off.

The origins of this study date back to Charles Darwin’s observations of spiders ballooning en masse aboard a ship at sea. Darwin wondered if the spiders were using electrostatics to take off. Erica Morley, a University of Bristol sensory biologist arranged a flight simulator for spiders in order to find out.

“In the early 1800s, there were arguments spiders might be using electric fields to balloon, but then there were also people arguing that it was wind,” said Morley. “And the argument for wind won over probably because it’s more obvious.”

Since then, scientists uncovered a naturally-occurring global electric field — located between the negatively charged surface of the Earth and the positively charged air residing 50 to 600 miles up, known as the ionosphere. But until five years ago, no one had revisited the effect this electric field might have on spiders.

Morley built an “arena” the size of a mini fridge sheltered from air currents and from electric fields to observe spider behavior under controlled conditions. She then created electric fields to mimic those found in nature by installing charged metal plates — electrodes — on the bottom and the top of the clear plastic box.

When she switched the electric field on, spiders began “tiptoeing” on the top of a vertical cardboard strip — mimicking the behavior they'd have in nature. The spiders lifted their abdomens into the air and started tiptoeing by raising up on the very ends of their legs right before they release silk drag-lines to fly away. What’s more, when a spider took off, Morley could move the spider up and down by switching the electric field on and off. “I was really excited when that happened,” Morley said. She knew spiders grow thousands of sensory hairs on their bodies, which as mentioned above, can detect sound and tiny currents of air. Suspecting these hairs might sense electric fields too, Morley then focused a small beam of polarized, full spectrum light onto individual hairs to see if they moved. When the light reflection off of a hair that has moved was analyzed, the wavelength, or color, of the laser light slightly changes. “Spiders have a lot of spines and other kinds of hairs. But it’s this one particular kind of hair — called trichobothria — that was stimulated to move in the electric field."

(Below: running water & some emf principles applied to web formation.)

Ref: Electric Fields Elicit Ballooning in Spiders, Erica L. Morley, Daniel Robert, C. Biology

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.05.057

By R. Eady

Randy Eady is a Facilitating Therapist (focused on balance & movement disorders) who uses innovative, nature-based treatments to create a space where sensibility & sensitivity converge... Opening new dimensions in perception between humans & the natural world.