Spiders, known for their poor eyesight, use their webs to detect vibrations from trapped prey. They exhibit a crouching behavior and actively vibrate the web, particularly when the prey is stationary, to sense them better. Johns Hopkins University's Terradynamics Laboratory has developed spider robots to study this behavior more effectively, finding that the crouching helps spiders differentiate web frequencies. Their research underscores the effectiveness of robotic models in studying complex biological behaviors, as live animal experiments are often challenging and unpredictable.
"Our lab investigates biological problems using robot physical models. Animal experiments are really hard to reproduce because it's hard to get the animal to do what you want to do."
The results provide evidence for the hypothesis that spiders crouch to sense differences in web frequencies to locate prey that isn't moving—something analogous to echolocation.
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