Newly discovered spider builds spring loaded snare to catch ants

Just saw glow worms for the first time last month. Very cool critters. Not sure I even knew they existed before that.

The smart spider is portia, a jumping spider. A quick search uncovers zounds of videos, articles, and scientific publications on them.

They specialize is hunting spiders, changing hunting tactics based on type and number of prey. Yes, they count. They strategize. They make multi-step plans that take them out of sight of prey. And some people keep them as pets.

> Notice that the spider is carefully moving out of the way, just a second before the ant is launched.

It's not moving before the ant is launched. It's moving as soon as the tension in the web is gone, ie. there's movement in their web. Most spiders react to movement in their web.

The weirdest insects I've seen in real life are these ones called Burying Beetles - they have chemoreceptors that allow them to detect the odor of a dead mouse from as far away as two miles. Then a male and female fly to it, dig a big hole, strip all the fur off of it to line the hole, then drag it down in there and raise their young together. They are also unusual in that outside of bees and ants, very few insects raise their young together from infancy to adulthood.

> lay its egg on the caterpillar

> it will close its nest without any caterpillar inside, where the larva will die out from lack of food

...wouldn't the larva be with the caterpillar? You said that's where it lays the eggs.

> Somebody needs to include this thing in the script of a science fiction film.

"The Fly" is ready for a quick rewrite.

As a general rule of dynamical systems, specialization is essentially the exploitation of regularity within your environment.

A highly regular environment can allow for extreme specialization because a system can predict and "expect" certain situations. This leads to much less energy expended, since maintaining stability requires energy that scales with the turbulence of a system.

If gravity is always down, you don't need to spend energy on organs that overcome gravity in other directions. Your circulatory system can use gravity to its advantage; that's why you can't just remain upside down, there's no effective mechanism to pump blood out of your brain.

If a car passes a street exactly every 2 minutes, you don't need to spend lots of time and energy figuring out when to cross. You know once a car crosses, you're good for 2 minutes. If you know the sun comes up around the same time every day, you can allow yourself a deep sleep during the night if you're in a safe place, or bloom only during the day.

Nature exploits such regularities in order to reduce the energy needed to maintain an organism or group, which creates specialization, whether on the scale of the group, on the scale of the individual, etc. This is hierarchical; your cells specialize, your organs specialize, you get training or education to specialize your skills, etc. For example, you might specialize as a software engineer, depending on the regularity of people willing to pay money for you to solve their problems, but AI comes around and suddenly you're out of a job.

The danger is that the more regularities you depend on, the less free energy your body needs to keep around and the less free energy you have to suddenly react and adapt to a new environment. If tomorrow, gravity started being up and not down, most of us would have a bad time. If those regularities are interdependent, as geological/biological cycles tend to be, a few bad conditions could unravel the entire ecosystem.

that's precisely their point