skip to main content
The spider-whisperers
December 1, 2011 3:41 PM Subscribe
Habronattus dossenus / Jumping Spider Mating Dance (with Sound!)The study of vibration communication is gaining momentum as scientists realize just how ubiquitous it is. But why is it taking so long to catch up with other sensory systems? "It’s really been ignored because we can’t detect it," said U.C. Berkeley biologist Damian Elias, who studies spiders. "This type of sense is totally foreign to the experience of being human." [...] Now, scientists suspect that more than 200,000 insect and arachnid species use seismic communication systems, including crickets, katydids, spiders, and scorpions. Crustaceans do, too. Amphibians? Definitely. Frogs are among the most sensitive vertebrate vibration detectors on land. Reptiles, such as snakes and lizards, also join the ground-sensing group. So do our hairy mammalian relatives, from the very big to the very small.
Numerous animals use vibrations propagating through a substrate to communicate with conspecifics, predators or prey. This mode of communication has reached extraordinary heights in insects and spiders, where it is both highly sophisticated and remarkably diverse in function. Vibrational signals are probably not very costly to produce for such small animals, whereas the effective generation of air-borne sound is constrained by body size. However, the vibrations created by insects and spiders do not range further than a few metres, but relative to the size of these arthropods this is actually quite substantial. Until recently, vibrational communication had received very little attention, but now a growing number of studies is revealing more and more examples and roles of vibrational signals.
posted by eagle-bear (23 comments total)
14 users marked this as a favorite
« Older Revolutionary Road author Richard Yates was the in... | "One thing about life in ... Newer »
posted by danny the boy at 3:50 PM on December 1, 2011