The smaller spiders should make more mistakes. Knowing the incredible costs of having a tiny body and thus an outsize brain, he expected to see that cost reflected in their webs. So Eberhard used these web-making mistakes as a proxy for cognitive capacity. And although they are exceptional architects, they do make mistakes-and those mistakes are pretty consistent over time. So would such a giant be more intelligent than a human? If the scaling principles hold from the world of spiders, the answer is no, as can be seen by looking closely at the webs they spin.Īs a spider constructs a web, it must continually make decisions, finding the most efficient places to attach each thread. The giant’s brain alone would weigh 910,000 kilograms. For perspective, imagine a normal adult man standing next to a giant who stood 400 kilometers tall and weighed more than 300 blue whales. The largest he has worked with weighs around three grams, whereas the smallest weighs 0.005 milligram-roughly 600,000 times as small as its cousin. Take Eberhard’s favorite group of creatures, orb weaver spiders. The comparison of scale in this spider world boggles the mind. Their bodies were being deformed by these brains,” he says.
BIGGEST SPIDER IN THE WORLD FULL
In the tiny ones they were going into the legs, and the sternum was bulging out, and it was full of brain. “Their brains were not staying in the right parts of their body. The same thing happens to some of Eberhard’s smaller spiders.
The trip is the same, but the space just got tight, so you will have to be more efficient, and your bag might be bursting at the seams. Imagine packing for a trip with a massive suitcase and then learning that the plane will accept only luggage half that size. And there seem to be no good ideas as to why in the world it’s true,” says William Eberhard, a spider researcher and frequent collaborator with Wcislo, who also works at the Tropical Research Institute. “It’s extremely general, and it’s been known for a long time. And what is amazing is that few if any creatures on earth violate this rule. It holds that smaller creatures will have smaller brains but that the ratio of brain to body size will actually go up. Scientists interested in brain miniaturization often refer to something called Haller’s rule, proposed by German neuroscientist Bernhard Rensch and named for the 18th-century father of physiology, Albrecht von Haller. This research, in fact, may hold clues to innovative design strategies that engineers might incorporate in future generations of computers. In other words, it is what scientists call brain miniaturization, not unlike the scaling down in size of the transistors in a computer chip. But Wcislo is part of a small community of scientists less interested in how brains have grown than how they have shrunk and yet shockingly still perform tasks as well as or better than similar species much larger in size. Do you need a big brain to hunt elusive prey, design complicated structures or produce complex social dynamics?įor generations scientists have wondered how intelligent creatures developed large brains to perform complicated tasks. But a growing number of scientists are asking whether it is the only way. No one would argue that a tarantula is as smart as a dolphin or that having a really big brain is not an excellent way to perform complicated tasks. So then there’s the question: How do they do that?” “But their behavior, as far as we can see, is as sophisticated as things that have relatively large brains. “Insects and spiders and the like-in terms of absolute size-have among the tiniest brains we’ve come across,” says William Wcislo, a scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City. For reference, that is about the same difference in scale between that same tarantula and a bottlenose dolphin.Īnd yet the bigger spider does not act in more complex ways than its tiny counterpart. The largest spider in the world is the goliath bird eater tarantula, which weighs 142 grams and is about the size of a dinner plate. The Samoan moss spider, the world’s smallest arachnid at a third of a millimeter, is nearly invisible to the human eye.
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