Terrifying study reveals spiders can actually 'hear' you from across the room
Health & Science
By
Mirror
| Oct 17, 2016
Scientists have found a new kind of spider sense that we didn't know about before.
Even though spiders don't have ears, it turns out they can still 'hear' you coming by picking up vibrations in the air through the hairs on their legs.
Originally it was thought that this technique could only be used across a very short distance, but a new study reveals the truth.
Researchers at Cornell University found that a common type of jumping spider can actually pick up sound vibrations from as far as ten feet away.
That means it could hear you coming from across the room and scurry out of the way before you noticed it.
Spiders have excellent sense of sight but it hasn't ever really been known how well their other senses worked. The team at Cornell published their findings in the journal Current Biology.
"I've worked with these animals for a long time now and all of a sudden you realize that their world is completely different from what you thought," Paul Shamble, co-first author of the study, told NPR.
"You thought they were just these little creatures of vibration and vision, and now all of a sudden you realize that they can hear, too."
Apparently, the scientists made the discovery by accident. They were testing how the creatures responded to visual information by measuring neural responses in their brains. Then someone moved their lab chair which let out a loud squeak and the spiders responded to it.
To test out the new idea, they started clapping - firstly right next to the spider and then further away, to see what happened.
"It kept on happening. And after a while I was standing out in the main lab, more than 3 meters away from the spider, clapping, and it was still happening," Shamble said.
"It was one of those strange moments, where it was like, based on what we know, this shouldn't be happening, but it definitely is."
Although this study was carried out on a jumping spider, the team believe that other species of spiders are probably capable of hearing at greater distances than we thought as well.