Even people who aren’t fans of spiders can appreciate the intricate beauty of their webs. It’s even more fascinating when you consider the fact that the arachnids have tiny brains, yet somehow can build these geometrically precise creations.
Now, scientists at Johns Hopkins University have used artificial intelligence and night vision to establish how exactly spiders build their webs.
“I first got interested in this topic while I was out birding with my son,” said senior author Dr Andrew Gordus, a Johns Hopkins behavioural biologist.
“After seeing a spectacular web I thought, ‘if you went to a zoo and saw a chimpanzee building this you’d think that’s one amazing and impressive chimpanzee’. Well, this is even more amazing because a spider’s brain is so tiny and I was frustrated that we didn’t know more about how this remarkable behaviour occurs. Now we’ve defined the entire choreography for web-building, which has never been done for any animal architecture at this fine of a resolution.”
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