The wood spider is the most accomplished of all web-building species.
Recently, scientists gave these tiny creatures a variety of psycho-active drugs to observe their effect on web building.
When given a minute dose of LSD, the spider’s web took on an unfamiliar minimal structure.
When given caffeine, the web structure was not affected, but the spider’s behaviour was.
Given THC, the active ingredient in marihuana, the spider didn’t build a web. It built a hammock, where it lay all day and watched the caffeine spider go.
When given alcohol, the spider built a web, found a mate and raised over a hundred young.
But the mate got a restraining order, and now the spider can’t go within a hundred centimetres of the web.
The crack cocaine spider figured building webs was for suckers, waited till the caffeine spider was exhausted then came up behind it and popped a cap in its ass.
Nice web, Mr Crack spider.
When winter came, the marihuana spider had no place to live. It ended up in the crack web as the crack spider’s bitch.
For more information on the crack spider’s bitch, contact the Canadian Wildlife service in Ottawa.
In 1948, Swiss pharmacologist Peter N. Witt started his research on the effect of drugs on spiders. The initial motivation for the study was a request from his colleague, zoologist H. M. Peters, to shift the time when garden spiders build their webs from 2am–5am, which apparently annoyed Peters, to earlier hours. Witt tested spiders with a range of psychoactive drugs, including amphetamine, mescaline, strychnine, LSD, and caffeine, and found that the drugs affect the size and shape of the web rather than the time when it is built. At small doses of caffeine (10 µg/spider), the webs were smaller; the radii were uneven, but the regularity of the circles was unaffected. At higher doses (100 µg/spider), the shape changed more, and the web design became irregular. All the drugs tested reduced web regularity except for small doses (0.1–0.3 µg) of LSD, which increased web regularity.
The drugs were administered by dissolving them in sugar water, and a drop of solution was touched to the spider's mouth. In some later studies, spiders were fed with drugged flies. For qualitative studies, a well-defined volume of solution was administered through a fine syringe. The webs were photographed for the same spider before and after drugging.
Witt's research was discontinued, but it became reinvigorated in 1984 after a paper by J.A. Nathanson in the journal Science, which is discussed below. In 1995, a NASA research group repeated Witt's experiments on the effect of caffeine, benzedrine, marijuana and chloral hydrate on European garden spiders. NASA's results were qualitatively similar to those of Witt, but the novelty was that the pattern of the spider web was quantitatively analyzed with modern statistical tools, and proposed as a sensitive method of drug detection.
