jumping spiders
If spiders are as intelligent as many vertebrates …
… and it appears that they are, what is the role of the brain in mediating intelligence? Spiders have rather different brains from vertebrates; much simpler, for one thing: Ronald R. Hoy, Cornell University professor of neurobiology and behavior, considers the spider “one of the smartest of all invertebrates.” But while its behavior is comparable to that of many vertebrates, its anatomy is not: “Dr. Hoy and his colleagues wanted to study jumping spiders because they are very different from most of their kind. They do not wait in a sticky web for lunch to fall into a trap. They search out prey, stalk it and pounce. “They’ve essentially become cats,” Dr. Hoy said. And they do all this with Read More ›