Fun with Science Club®


			Spider robots unlocked the mysteries of web-building. Beth Tyler 05.03.01 Spiders can build some pretty complicated webs. Webs in different places can look very different from each other. Scientists Thiemo Krink and Fritz Vollrath wanted to figure out how the garden cross spider (Araneus diadematus) decides what kind of web to build. This is hard to do, because they can't get into the spider's brain. So instead they used computerized spiders. Krink and Vollrath decided to make some spiders on the computer. They gave the computer spider the exact same size space to build a web that the real life spider had. Then they gave the computerized spiders some simple decision-making skills (they gave the computer spiders brains!). To figure out which decision-making skills garden cross spiders have, the two scientists compared the webs the computerized spiders built to the webs garden cross spiders built. If a web in the computer habitat looked just like a web in the garden cross spider habitat, the scientists knew they had given the computerized spider a good set of rules. In this experiment, the two scientists discovered how spiders make decisions in building their webs.


			Krink, Thiemo, and Fritz Vollrath. 1998. Emergent properties in the behaviour of a vitual spider robot. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences, 265: 2051-2055.