Spider Uses Its Web Like a Giant Engineered Ear

Bridge spiders “outsource” their hearing by building webs that double as acoustic arrays, allowing them to perceive sounds from great distances.

Written byDan Robitzski

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Update (March 29, 2022): The paper described in this article was published today in PNAS.

o hunt for alien life, human scientists build bigger and more sensitive arrays in the hopes of picking up a radio transmission from a faraway world. It turns out that Larinioides sclopetarius, also known as the bridge spider or gray cross spider, uses a similar trick. Instead of hunting for E.T., the spider can tune in to its surroundings and hear across great distances by treating its round, orb-shaped web like a comparatively giant acoustic array, according to new research.

The bridge spider uses its web as an engineered “external ear” up to 10,000 times the size of its body, according to a preprint study posted to bioRxiv on October 18. The discovery, which has not yet been peer reviewed, challenges many assumptions that scientists have held for years ...

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Meet the Author

Dan Robitzski
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Dan is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles who joined The Scientist as a reporter and editor in 2021. Ironically, Dan’s undergraduate degree and brief career in neuroscience inspired him to write about research rather than conduct it, culminating in him earning a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University in 2017. In 2018, an Undark feature Dan and colleagues began at NYU on a questionable drug approval decision at the FDA won first place in the student category of the Association of Health Care Journalists' Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. Now, Dan writes and edits stories on all aspects of the life sciences for the online news desk, and he oversees the “The Literature” and “Modus Operandi” sections of the monthly TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. Read more of his work at danrobitzski.com.
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