Ever wonder what a spider’s web sounds like? Well thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, we can now recreate spider signals that are otherwise inaudible to the human ear, thus bringing us closer to learning their “language.”
We know this sounds like the beginning of a horror movie unfolding, and once you hear the “music” recorded from the spiders and their webs, you’ll believe it even more.
What you’re hearing in this recording is a series of vibrational patterns, each of which represents some type of behavioral action the spider will take. Despite usually having eight eyes, most spiders apparently don’t have the best sight. That being the case, they often use vibrations in their web to determine what’s in their environment and their course of action, whether that be finding food in their proximity or identifying a break in their web’s construction.
“Spiders utilize vibrations as a way to communicate with the environment, with other spiders,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Markus Buehler. “We have recorded these vibrations from spiders and used artificial intelligence to learn these vibrational patterns and associate them with certain actions, basically learning the spider’s language.”
According to Reuters, all 47,000 species of spiders spin webs, a fact that could potentially lead us to being able to understand quite a bit about these eight-legged creatures through continuing to decode their music.
