This is not some virtual reality program or a reaction to learn patterns, spiders create music as a communication mechanism. We could even say that it is a haunting, foreboding, and reverberant melody, enough to send a tingle down the spine.
The communication between spiders is so sophisticated that they manage to discern between their prey, companions, and natural phenomena only with the webs they weave to live and that is mainly due to how they perceive the world: their web. And the thing is, spiders “speak”, only in a tremendously rudimentary way, without syntax or voice. Their vocabulary is based on a series of vibrations that they transmit through media such as their fabrics or that impact directly on their peers.
Spiders create music through cobwebs
If we could understand the meaning of these vibrations and create a kind of spider-human dictionary, we could immerse ourselves in their world in a completely different way and study their behaviors from a new perspective. However, more than letters there is a whole symphony. Spiders are sensory animals. So much so, that they communicate with each other through vibrations in their webs, according to a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The key to this phenomenon was discovered by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.
The team of scientists who conducted the research realized that spiders establish communication between themselves based on the waves in their webs since they react differently to the vibrations emitted by different objects. For example, the movement of a captive prey is not the same as that produced by the wind, they explain in a statement.
For this reason, scientists attribute the diversity of spiders that exist on the planet to this dynamic. What’s more, they think that the construction of the spider webs is carried out with high-performance material design. From the research results, they discovered that spider webs not only optimize communication between spiders but also have a sophisticated architecture. At an aesthetic, biological, and material use level, arachnids are capable of building networks that guarantee their survival in their environment.
This story was written in Spanish by Perla Vallejo in Ecoosfera
