Dejkala
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Tech
  • Banking & loan
  • Games
  • Car’s & Bike’s
  • Home
  • Tech
  • Banking & loan
  • Games
  • Car’s & Bike’s
No Result
View All Result
Dejkala
No Result
View All Result
Home Latest update

Sorry, prey. Black widows have surprisingly good memory- Dejkala

by hasibul
November 1, 2022
in Latest update
0
Sorry, prey. Black widows have surprisingly good memory- Dejkala
0
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter


Sorry, prey. Black widows have surprisingly good memory

Robert Llewellyn / Getty Images

Black widows must despise Clint Sergi. While working on his Ph.D. in biology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sergi spent his time designing little challenges for spiders—which often involved rewarding them with tasty dead crickets or confounding them by stealing the crickets away. “The big question that motivated the work was just wanting to know what is going on inside the minds of animals,” he says.

Biologists already know spider brains aren’t like human brains. Their sensory world is geared for life in webs and dark corners. “Humans are very visual animals,” says Sergi. “These web-building spiders have almost no vision. They have eyes, but they’re mostly good for sensing light and motion.” Instead, he says, a black widow’s perception comes mainly from vibrations, kind of like hearing. “Their legs are sort of like ears that pick up the vibrations through the web.”

And in terms of cognition, biologists know that these spiders remember when they’ve caught prey. Some scientists, including Sergi, believe that they even form mental representations of their webs. Yet not much is known about how detailed their memories are, or how past events affect their future decisions. So Sergi and his adviser, spider cognition expert Rafa Rodríguez, decided to put black widow memory to the test. As you might guess, Sergi would offer spiders dead crickets and then steal them back.

The result, they wrote in the journal Ethology, shows that black widows have better memories than previously known. When their prey is spirited away, the spiders search for it repeatedly in the right place. In some cases, they appear to recall the prey’s size—searching more for the biggest stolen snacks. “They’re not just reacting to a particular stimulus using set patterns of behavior,” says Sergi. “They have the capacity to make decisions.”

Advertisement

This work serves as a reminder that complex cognitive computations are widespread in the animal kingdom—that internal navigation systems turn up in both big and minuscule brains, including ones that depend on vastly different sensory inputs. “It shows that arthropods are capable of encoding complex memories that people oftentimes associate with vertebrates,” says Andrew Gordus, a behavioral neuroscientist with Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the work. “Invertebrates are a lot more sophisticated than we give them credit for.”

Sergi’s results add to mounting evidence that insects and spiders form—and act on—detailed memories, similarly to the way humans do, but with very different machinery. We orient ourselves with “place cells” in the hippocampus, which arthropods lack. Yet, Gordus says, “they have brain regions that evolved to perform the same function.”

Your central nervous system contains a spinal cord and a 3-pound brain. Spiders have two clusters of neurons called ganglia: one above the esophagus, one below it. This brain’s critical input comes from thousands of sensors along the spider’s exoskeleton called slit sensilla. Each looks like a tiny crack, which deforms as vibrations sweep through the spider’s body. (Some evidence suggests that widows can tune into different frequencies by adjusting their posture.) Spiders are so well-wired to sense vibrations that there is even a debate about whether the spiderweb is part of its brain.

Compared with humanity’s giant lump of gray matter, this might seem like a radically different computer for processing memories. But to Sergi, what an animal’s brain looks like matters less than the behaviors it produces. For example, birds, as a biological class, have a common brain structure. Yet some excel at cognitive tasks that others don’t. Crows count and use zero. Cockatoos solve logic puzzles. Blue jays hide food in the summer and fall, then remember where to find it in the winter. Even among mammals, another class with similarities in brain structure, some animals are better than others at locating stashed food. Squirrels, of course, are great at it. “They have a standard mammal brain, but they’re way better than even humans at remembering where they’ve stuck things,” says Sergi. “But you wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that from just looking at the brain anatomy or watching what they do in an MRI.”


Related

ShareTweetShare

Related Posts

FTC wants to make it easier for you to cancel subscriptions- Dejkala
Latest update

FTC wants to make it easier for you to cancel subscriptions- Dejkala

March 23, 2023
Diablo 4 might brick your RTX 3080 Ti graphics card- Dejkala
Latest update

Diablo 4 might brick your RTX 3080 Ti graphics card- Dejkala

March 23, 2023
Montenegro's Interior Minister Filip Adzic says Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon has been arrested at the Podgorica airport with falsified documents (CoinDesk)- Dejkala
Latest update

Montenegro's Interior Minister Filip Adzic says Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon has been arrested at the Podgorica airport with falsified documents (CoinDesk)- Dejkala

March 23, 2023
How and where to buy refurbished tech online- Dejkala
Latest update

How and where to buy refurbished tech online- Dejkala

March 23, 2023
The FTC proposes a "click to cancel" ban on difficult-to-cancel subscriptions, including making canceling as simple as subscribing by using the same method (Adi Robertson/The Verge)- Dejkala
Latest update

The FTC proposes a "click to cancel" ban on difficult-to-cancel subscriptions, including making canceling as simple as subscribing by using the same method (Adi Robertson/The Verge)- Dejkala

March 23, 2023
A live blog of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew's testimony before Congress, as he attempts to address national security concerns over ByteDance's ownership of the app (Washington Post)- Dejkala
Latest update

A live blog of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew's testimony before Congress, as he attempts to address national security concerns over ByteDance's ownership of the app (Washington Post)- Dejkala

March 23, 2023
Next Post
Apple iPad Pro review (2022): An impressive stopgap- Dejkala

Apple iPad Pro review (2022): An impressive stopgap- Dejkala

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Categories

  • Earn Money Online
  • Game news and review
  • Laptops
  • Latest update
  • Smartphone Reviews & News
  • TODAY Tech News
  • Upcoming Technology
  • Wordpress plugin
  • WordPress themes
  • World Wide Bike Reviews and News
  • World Wide Car News

Recommended

Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 7900 XT review: No-fuss performance- Dejkala

Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 7900 XT review: No-fuss performance- Dejkala

March 17, 2023
Some companies are taking a liberal interpretation of CA's pay transparency law with wide pay ranges; one Netflix job posting has a pay range of $90K to $900K (Bloomberg)- Dejkala

Some companies are taking a liberal interpretation of CA's pay transparency law with wide pay ranges; one Netflix job posting has a pay range of $90K to $900K (Bloomberg)- Dejkala

January 7, 2023
Uber drivers in Europe can soon rent Polestar and Tesla EVs- Dejkala

Uber drivers in Europe can soon rent Polestar and Tesla EVs- Dejkala

January 17, 2023
OpenAI may have tested GPT-4 on its training data, violating the cardinal rule of ML, and GPT-4's exam performance says little about its real-world usefulness (AI Snake Oil)- Dejkala

OpenAI may have tested GPT-4 on its training data, violating the cardinal rule of ML, and GPT-4's exam performance says little about its real-world usefulness (AI Snake Oil)- Dejkala

March 21, 2023
US prosecutors say two men conspired with Russian hackers to tamper with JFK airport's taxi queuing software, allegedly letting drivers cut the line for a fee (James Reddick/The Record)- Dejkala

US prosecutors say two men conspired with Russian hackers to tamper with JFK airport's taxi queuing software, allegedly letting drivers cut the line for a fee (James Reddick/The Record)- Dejkala

December 20, 2022
Engadget Podcast: The most interesting things from Mobile World Congress 2023- Dejkala

Engadget Podcast: The most interesting things from Mobile World Congress 2023- Dejkala

March 3, 2023
FTC wants to make it easier for you to cancel subscriptions- Dejkala

FTC wants to make it easier for you to cancel subscriptions- Dejkala

March 23, 2023
Diablo 4 might brick your RTX 3080 Ti graphics card- Dejkala

Diablo 4 might brick your RTX 3080 Ti graphics card- Dejkala

March 23, 2023
Montenegro's Interior Minister Filip Adzic says Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon has been arrested at the Podgorica airport with falsified documents (CoinDesk)- Dejkala

Montenegro's Interior Minister Filip Adzic says Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon has been arrested at the Podgorica airport with falsified documents (CoinDesk)- Dejkala

March 23, 2023

Categories

  • Earn Money Online
  • Game news and review
  • Laptops
  • Latest update
  • Smartphone Reviews & News
  • TODAY Tech News
  • Upcoming Technology
  • Wordpress plugin
  • WordPress themes
  • World Wide Bike Reviews and News
  • World Wide Car News

Pages

  • About Us
  • Banking & loan
  • Car’s & Bike’s
  • Contact Us
  • Games
  • Home
  • Home 2
  • Privacy Policy
  • Tech

© 2022 Dejkala

No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home – Layout 1
    • Home – Layout 2

© 2022 Dejkala