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Well That’s Creepy: Spiders Can Hear You

© Flickr / Thomas ShahanJumping Spider
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Despite the fact that they have no ear drums, the eight-legged creepy-crawlies can hear you “walking and talking” from more than 10 feet away, new research has found.

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The study was conducted by researchers at Cornell University and was published in Current Biology October 13. The scientists found that spiders, specifically the jumping spider, can perceive and respond to airborne acoustic stimuli, even at relatively great distances. It was previously believed that they could only sense vibrations in the air from a few centimeters away.

"In the movies, Spider-Man has this strange, additional 'spidey sense' that helps him sense danger – it turns out the real-life spidey sense of spiders might actually be hearing," researcher Gil Menda told Phys.org.

The finding was accidental, thanks to a squeaky chair in the lab.

"One day, Gil was setting up one of these experiments and started recording from an area deeper in the brain than we usually focused on," Paul Shamble, one of the researchers, told Phys.org. "As he moved away from the spider, his chair squeaked across the floor of the lab. The way we do neural recordings, we set up a speaker so that you can hear when neurons fire – they make this really distinct 'pop' sound – and when Gil's chair squeaked, the neuron we were recording from started popping. He did it again, and the neuron fired again."

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They believe that the sound is perceived by hairs on spider’s legs, which detect vibrations through the air.

"We found that when we shook single sensory hairs back and forth – these are the same hairs that are known to respond to sounds originating close to the animal – we also got responses," Shamble says. "This suggests that these hairs are how spiders are registering faraway sounds."

After discovering the hearing ability of the jumping spider, the scientists then did tests on other spider species and found that at least five others share the same skill. They are now continuing the tests on more species, such as wolf and fishing spiders.

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