Kiwi Kids News

Spiders are listening to you?

According to scientists spiders can hear everything you do and say. This is a huge surprise because spiders do not have ears. US and Israeli scientists have been monitoring spiders and testing them for sometime and they have found some alarming facts. The researchers say that tiny hairs on the forelegs of jumping spiders – and likely others – get stimulated by vibrations in the room. This then activates an area in their brains involved with sound processing. Previously it was believed that spiders could only detect sounds from a few centimetres away. 

This amazing discovery was found by accident. The group of scientists had been working on ways to make neural recordings from the brains of jumping spiders using tiny probes in their tiny brains. One of the researchers crossed the room and his chair squeaked, which pinged their recording equipment.

So, they tested for distance, clapping close to the spider then farther and farther away, until they were outside the recording room five metres from the spider. Amazingly, the spider picked up the sound. Based on everything that we know about spider this shouldn’t be possible. It seems those sensory hairs that work up close also work over a long distance.