So a friend of mine sent me a link to this video figuring I would get a kick out of it…

He was right Thanks for the laugh, Timmy.

While this video is a spoof, the experiments that the video is based on are not. In 1948 a zoologist by the name of HM Peters was studying webspinning in spiders and was trying to figure out how to get the spiders to build their webs during the day and not in the wee hours of the night. Dr. Peter Witt, a pharmacologist, suggested he try amphetamines. While the amphetamines didn’t alter the time of day the spiders were building their webs the drug did alter the structure of the web.

“Then Witt tried mescaline, strychnine, caffeine, and others. Low-dosed caffeinated spiders produced a smaller but wider web with a normal spiral but radii at oversized angles. At higher doses, like with the other drugs, web regularity got distorted. Only with low doses of the hallucinogen LSD-25 did the spiders spin webs of greater regularity.” (R. Foelix, Biology of Spiders)

Dr. Peter Witt has also written a book on spider communication

Science can be really fun sometimes

Trackback URI | Comments RSS