Did you ever ask yourself what would happen if you feed spiders with psychoactive substances? - No, and you do also not know how one might get this idea?
So then here is the great answer:
It all started with the coziness of man, because in 1948 the zoologist H. M. Peters worked on garden spiders and how they build their webs. Since they usually web between 2am-5am he asked his friend, a swiss pharmacologist, Peter N. Witt if he could somehow influence and shift their time of productivity. And what did the pharmacologist do?...
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.
. . .
In 1995, a NASA research group repeated Witt's experiments on the effect of caffeine, benzedrine, marijuana and chloral hydrate on European garden spiders:
Spiders on marijuana had good attempts, but after a while lost their concentration and did not finish their work properly. Those on benzedrine (Speed), spun their webs with great verve, but little planning leaving big holes unfinished.
Surprisingly, the two strongest impairments in the ability to spin a ordinary web were found with chloral hydrate (an ingredient of sleeping pills) and caffeine!
And why is all of this not just funny nonsense?
The scientists claim that their research demonstrates, that web-spinning spiders can be used to test drugs towards their toxicity. Their original intention was to be able to draw conclusions about toxicity by quantifying the reduced order of spider webs.
This would have saved ‘higher' animals like micea and also time and money.
However, because of limited explanatory power and strict regulations on the determination of toxicities, there is - to my knowledge - no general use of this.
But keep the following in mind:
"It appears that one of the most telling measures of toxicity is a decrease, in comparison with a normal web, of the numbers of completed sides [of a web]; the greater the toxicity, the more sides the spider fails to complete", the scientists said.
. . .
This statement is particularly astonishing when you recall that the most consumed beverage by humans worldwide is coffee!
I hope you liked this scientific insight, and if so follow me for more!
Best,
mountain.phil28
References:
- Spiders on Drugs, a Science Alert
- Results of experiments with Spiders and Drugs, a KScience Report
- NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 19, No. 4, Pg. 82, April 1995
- Effect of psychoactive drugs on animals, a Wikipedia Article