Spiders can be said to be a very intriguing creature. Whether giant spiders that make you have nightmares or spiders that prey in organized groups, these tiny creatures can be spectacular. Now researchers from Johns Hopkins University may have solved one of the biggest mysteries surrounding spiders. The researchers point out that they can use night vision and artificial intelligence to understand how spiders make webs. The researchers published their findings online and in the November 2021 issue of current biology. Andrew gordus, one of the co authors, said that his first interest in how spiders make webs occurred one day when he went out with his son to catch birds. Gordus is also a behavioral biologist at the Kriging School of Arts and Sciences. "After seeing a spectacular web, I thought, 'if you go to the zoo and see chimpanzees building this, you'll think it's a great and impressive chimpanzee,'" gordus shared in a press release on the study, "Then it's even more surprising, because the spider's brain is so small, and I'm frustrated because we don't know more about how this extraordinary behavior happens." Not all spiders can make webs, but those that do have fascinated scientists for centuries. How do they determine when and where to network? How do they build such stable and reliable traps without looking? These problems have always been obstacles to understanding how spiders weave webs. Gordus said, but the first step is to understand how spiders' small heads support their advanced construction projects. To do this, researchers must systematically record and analyze all motor skills involved in this process. This was impossible before. But by using new technology, godrus and other researchers can capture and record all movements. The researchers focused on hackled orb weaver, a small spider species native to the western United States. These spiders make webs at night. As a result, researchers were able to set up an area in their laboratory with infrared cameras and light locations around the spider's habitat. There, they can record how spiders make webs. But this is only half the journey. Abel Corver, the study's lead author, pointed out that they must also track the legs of all six spiders they use. Corver was a graduate student studying neurophysiology and web weaving. He pointed out that this is too much for mankind. This is where AI helps. To understand how spiders make webs, researchers used artificial intelligence to track spider legs and accurately see how hacked orb weavers interact with their webs over time. They found that even if the final results looked different, spiders followed the same rules every time they built their web. In this regard, the researchers hope to better understand the larger brain system by better understanding the spider's brain. (Xinhua News Agency)