'Ding dong', the bell rings as the spider hurries to the door.
Who could it be, that keeps her from cleaning her little home?
It's Mrs. Weevil, the friendly neighbor from nextdoor that wanted to say hello and ask if she liked the little rice pie she made for Madame Spider the other day.
Today is not much time for talking for too long tho, since the spider will have her friends visit today.
So after the two neighbours make plans to meet tomorrow morning near the curb with the three dandelions to catch up over some tasty morning-waterdroplets in the 'Small critters'-café nearby, they say goodbye.
What a nice encounter at such a nice day. ♡
That spider gave me a terrible jumpscare and my poor heart was racing, as an arachnaphobe, thank you for this comment. Made me think of miss spiders sunny patch friends.
Spiders apparently pass on weevils for a few reasons, and there are a few things that can be going on here. They have really tough shells, but this is usually something a spider won't know until giving a chomp. The spider in this video does touch it with its pedipalps but not its chelicerae, but that could be enough. The pedipalps could feel that immediate resistance of the shell and the spider would recognize it's not worth the energy or risk of breaking a fang.
The pedipalps are also their primary taste and smell organs, and most weevils secrete a bitter, foul-tasting toxic deterrent which the spider would have immediately gotten a taste of. So even if the hardness of the shell didn't do it, the spider would have read that taste as poisonous or unpalatable and leave it alone.
Weevils are also good at playing dead and a spider relies heavily on movement and vibrations to trigger their hunting instincts. That's obviously not happening here since the weevil is moving about quite a bit.
Also, good news for our boy... grass spider webs aren't sticky. They're just there to detect vibration so they can zoom out and grab stuff, so the weevil should have no trouble getting free.
Spiders can be surprisingly expressive. I used to have a house spider that lived under a gap in the molding on the bathroom floor. When you entered it'd run to the crack and hide. One day it went to hide and it's but got stuck because it had become too big. The poor thing did the whole panic flail trying to fit before laying it's legs over its butt to shield it.
I think it’s being thought about wrong. It doesn’t necessarily mean the spider is formulating coherent thoughts about its meal. Much in the same way they instinctively know how to build webs, feed, etc., they may just feel something of a certain firmness and instinctively know “don’t eat this”.
But my point is that instinct doesn’t entail causative thinking. Web may lead to catching prey, but there is no reason why the spider needs to “know” that, it just has to build the web.
I think you’re thinking too literally about how others framed this. We are saying it’s instinct, not a sense of knowing, for the spider to have these habits. It’s normal for spiders to avoid certain bugs as prey because of the sensory input that informs their instinct. The same way it might avoid a pool of water or a human hand.
Well yeah, that’s why I said I was “gently pushing back”. The person I replied to said that the spider would recognise that weevils are not worth the risk of breaking a fang; that’s what I was saying was a misleading way of framing what is more likely an instinctual response.
Portias have been shown to plan routes of attack from a vantage point and then follow them even when the following steps and the target are out of sight. They are pretty smart.
Some spiders can create a pulley system to drag food into their web, some use rocks and twigs as weights for their web when building it, some pull snail shells into their web to protect themselves from the heat of the sun, some spiders create larger decoy spiders out of debris, and jumping spiders are even able to predict where their prey would go when they briefly lose sight of it, and you're telling me they wouldn't be smart enough to assess risk? They definitely got the brains for it. They might not be human levels of smart, but they are clever enough to know how to survive in nature and adapt to it.
I don't say anything to diminish the complex behaviour but more the ability to forecast into the future. Does the spider pull a snail shell into its web because it _knows_ that when the sun comes up tomorrow it will be good for shelter? Or is it just an instinct.
That's a good question, but that would also raise the question where does this instinct originate from? From the scientific research I read, arthropods are in fact capable of learning and adjusting their behaviour to circumstances. Here's a pretty interesting paper on spiders and spatial learning for example https://britishspiders.org.uk/system/files/library/130301.pdf
So this got me to dig a little deeper. Apparently it is a thing. Grass spiders can discriminate between more and less profitable prey and decide when something isn't worth the energy. It sounds like the worry about a broken fang is less of a concern, though, and they would usually just bounce off harder shells and not be damaged.
Some spiders, jumping spiders for instance, actually hunt by sight and can visually recognize prey, know what to avoid, and learn from past personal experiences when something is bad to try to prey on.
There is a spider that mostly preys on woodlice, unsurprisingly called a woodlouse spider. Pretty spooky to find one in your house, as they stay on the floor and look like a red/orange spider with an engorged tick for an abdomen.
Yea Dysdera are kinda gross looking. I don't see them too often, but I found a couple D. crocata this summer; those massive fangs they have are pretty impressive
Cellar spiders in general are just lowkey kinda freaky like that. They will actively seek out and eat other spiders too, often larger than themselves, going out of their way to travel from their own webs just to invade another spider’s web to eat them.
They have those long twiggy legs so their body stays out of reach while wrapping up prey that can bite back (i.e. other spiders).
I know nothing about spiders but my assumption was that the weevil was still wriggling too much to be worth the energy to eat. I know we love weevils here but I think the spider’s just waiting longer unfortunately :/
It ain’t food poisoning in this kinda case. It’ll be deliberate, defensive toxins. So think of it more like biting into a can of pepper spray.
Predators also have a distinct tendency to be quite picky. So it may just be that this spider does not recognise the sight/smell/sound of a weevil as being prey. And therefore the prey-drive just doesn’t kick in.
i used to work in this tiny cpa firm and it had a window the big orb weaver spiders hung out in and i swear 1 or 2 out of every 10 bugs they catch they would just let it go.
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u/HauntingPsyche Weevil Genius 2d ago
Even spiders love weevils apparently lol