Spiders depend quite significantly on touch to detect the world around them. Their bodies and legs are covered with small hairs and cracks that can distinguish between different types of vibrations.
The fact that prey enters a net produces a vibrational cry very different from another spider that is achieved, or for example, the agitation of a breeze. Each thread on a website produces a different tone.
A few years ago, scientists translated the three-dimensional structure of the web into music, working with artist Tomás Saraceno to create an interactive musical instrument, entitled Spider web. Now the team has refined and built from this previous work and added an interactive virtual reality component to allow people to enter and interact with the web.
This research, according to the team, will not only help them better understand the three-dimensional architecture of the spider web, but it can even help us learn the vibrational language of spiders.
“The spider lives in a vibrant rope environment,” said MIT engineer Markus Buehler. “They don’t see very well, so they feel their world through vibrations, which have different frequencies.”
When you think of a spider web, you probably think of the fabric of an orb weaver: flat, round, with radial spokes around which the spider builds a spiral web. However, most cobwebs are not of this type, but are constructed in three dimensions, such as leaves, tangle nets, and funnel nets, for example.
To explore the structure of this type of fabric, the team hosted a tropical tent fabric spider (Cyrtophora citricola) in a rectangular enclosure and hoped to fill the space with a three-dimensional grid. They then used a sheet laser to illuminate and create high-definition images of 2D cross sections of the web.
A specially developed algorithm brought together the 3D architecture of the web from these 2D cross sections. To turn it into music, different sound frequencies were assigned to different threads. The notes thus generated were reproduced in patterns based on the structure of the web.
They also scanned a network while spinning, translating every step of the process into music. This means that the notes change as the structure of the website changes and the listener can hear the process of building the website; having a step-by-step process log means we can also better understand how spiders build a 3D network without supporting structures, a skill that could be used for 3D printing, for example.
Spider web they allowed the audience to listen to spider music, but virtual reality, in which users can enter and play web threads, adds a new experience.
“The virtual reality environment is really intriguing because your ears will pick up on structural features that you might see but won’t immediately recognize,” Buehler explained.
“By listening to it and seeing it at the same time, you can begin to understand the environment in which the spider lives.”
This virtual reality environment, with realistic web physics, allows researchers to understand what happens when they also mix with parts of the web. Pull a string and the tone changes. Break one and see how this affects the other threads surrounding it. This can also help us understand the architecture of a spider web and why they are built the way they are.
And, perhaps most fascinatingly, the work allowed the team to develop an algorithm to identify the types of vibrations of a spider’s web, translating them into “trapped prey” or “fabric under construction” or another spider has arrived with a loving intention ”. . ”That, the team said, is the basis for the development of the learning of the talking spider, at least the tropical spider web.
“We’re now trying to generate synthetic signals to basically speak spider language,” Buehler said.
“If we expose them to certain patterns of rhythms or vibrations, can we affect what they do and can we start communicating with them? They’re really exciting ideas.”
The team presented their work at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society. His previous research was published in 2018 at Journal of the Royal Society Interface.