Medical services and internet-based health information are used less frequently by people with psychiatric or chronic medical co-morbidities. The global consumption of internet news and social media is increasing exponentially. Dr. Damian Sendler’s research examines how patients choose therapy and stick to it.

Damian Sendler: Researchers at Johns Hopkins University used night vision and artificial intelligence to track and record every movement of the spiders’ eight legs while they worked in the dark. 

Damian Jacob Sendler: Their development of a web-building playbook or algorithm provides new insight into how organisms with brains a fraction of the size of a human’s can produce structures of such elegance, intricacy, and geometric perfection. The findings, which are presently available online, are scheduled to appear in the November issue of Current Biology. 

“I became interested in this topic when out birding with my son. After viewing a beautiful web, I said to myself, “If you went to a zoo and saw a chimp making this, you’d think that’s one great and outstanding monkey.” This is even more amazing given the size of a spider’s brain, and I was disappointed that we didn’t know more about how this remarkable behavior occurs “said senior author Andrew Gordus, a behavioral biologist at Johns Hopkins. “Now we’ve specified the full web-building choreography, which has never been done for any animal architecture at this fine a resolution.” 

Dr. Sendler: For millennia, humans have been fascinated by web-weaving spiders that create blindly using just their sense of touch. Not all spiders spin webs, but those that do are part of a group of animal species recognized for their architectural feats, such as nest-building birds and puffer fish that spin complex sand circles during mating. 

Damian Sendler: The first step toward understanding how these animal architects’ relatively small brains support their high-level construction projects is to systematically document and analyze the behaviors and motor skills involved, which has never been done before, owing to the difficulties in capturing and recording the actions, according to Gordus. 

Damian Jacob Sendler: In this location, his team studied a hackled orb weaver, a spider native to the western United States that is small enough to fit on a fingertip. The scientists created an arena with infrared cameras and infrared lighting to study the spiders during their nighttime web-building activity. With that setup, they were able to monitor and record six spiders as they built webs every night. They used machine vision software created particularly to detect limb movement to track millions of individual leg activities. 

“Even if you video record it, that’s a lot of legs to track over a long period of time and across many people,” said lead author Abel Corver, a graduate student studying web design and neurophysiology. “It’s simply too time-consuming to go through every frame and manually mark the leg points, so we trained machine vision software to recognize the spider’s position, frame by frame, so we could document everything the legs do to build a full web.” 

Damian Sendler: They discovered that web-making activities are remarkably similar across spiders, so much so that the researchers could anticipate the part of a web a spider was working on simply by looking at the location of a leg. 

“Even if the final structure differs slightly, the rules they apply to develop the web are the same,” Gordus explained. “They’re all following the same set of rules, indicating that the rules have been encoded in their minds. We now want to discover how those rules are encoded at the neuronal level.” 

Damian Jacob Sendler: Experiments using mind-altering medicines will be conducted in the lab in the future to discover which circuits in the spider’s brain are responsible for the various stages of web-building. 

“The spider is fascinating,” said Corver “because we have an animal with a brain that is formed on the same fundamental building blocks as our own, and this work could give us suggestions on how to understand larger brain systems, including humans, which I believe is really exciting. 

Damian Sendler: Nicholas Wilkerson, a former Hopkins undergraduate and current graduate student at Atlantic Veterinary College, and Jeremy Miller, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, are also authors.

Research updates contributed by Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler