Huge Whip Spiders Wear Nail Polish for Science | Expedition Raw

2m read

·Nov 11, 2024

You want me to catch this one?

We're looking for wig spiders tonight because they have a remarkable navigational ability. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got them. They come back each night faithfully to the same little refuge site and this large tree that you've seen a little bit of. If you don't get it, they usually disappear into the tree crevices and that animal is lost for the night.

No, no, very aggressive. They can draw blood, and you got to tough it. Once you have the animal, you're not going to drop it just because it's pinching you.

We take this animal right now. All we do is use superglue, and we're going to put this radio transmitter on. Don't speed on that. Going to take it about 10 m away to a place it's never been to before and see how successful it is navigating back to the tree where we found it.

You generally see them progressively moving closer to the home tree over a series of days. There's a guy that was away 10 m, and he's pretty much exactly in the same spot when we captured it. It's pretty flippin' remarkable. It becomes reminiscent of the kinds of things that homing pigeons do and sea turtles do.

What sensory information are they using? Are they smelling their way back? Are they seeing their way back? Are they hearing their way back?

So, for some of the animals that we've captured, we're going to cover the tips of their antenna form legs with nail polish. And the question is, do you get back? They can't. It implies that smell and touch information is crucial for these animals to figure out how they're going to get their way back home.

It's really, really exciting to look at how a true kind of navigational system can evolve with a relatively simple nervous system that these guys have.

This is the big guy, right?

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Huge Whip Spiders Wear Nail Polish for Science | Expedition Raw

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