Hunting spiders can not only watch your every move, but they can feel those moves, and that of their prey, through the air.
How their tiny specialized hairs do it has puzzled researchers for decades, but one team of scientists may have found a break. Their physics-focused work suggests each hair acts like a single, independent ear — not a network of ear parts that, together, turn a spider’s exoskeleton into one giant ear, as was previously assumed.
“Nobody had looked at these hairs in just the right way. When you look at what they are mechanically optimized to do, you could design better ones,†said physicist Brice Bathellier of the Institute Of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, who co-authored a study of trichobothria hairs Dec. 14 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
“But nature optimizes. Animals evolve under stringent conditions,†Bathellier said. “So it became a question of what [the hairs] actually do...
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