What jumping spiders tell us about color
The science content creator Veritasium highlighted spider research at the University of Cincinnati to explain what we're learning about vision.
UC College of Arts and Sciences Associate Professor Nathan Morehouse shared how human color vision is mediocre compared to that of many other animals, including the jumping spiders he studies in his biology lab.
“Jumping spider eyes are fascinating,” Morehouse said. “Jumping spiders split up things like motion detection and light sensitivity to some eyes and then color vision and fine-detail vision to others.”
UC Associate Professor Nathan Morehouse. Photo/Jay Yocis/UC
The video features the work of Morehouse and his research partners: Megan Porter at the University of Hawaii; Lisa Taylor at the University of Florida; Wayne Maddison at the University of British Columbia and Emma Alexander at Northwestern University.
Morehouse said spider eyes are built much like a telescope with two lenses at either end of a fluid-filled tube that magnifies the image to increase the spider's ability to see detail with its retina.
Morehouse said jumping spiders have secondary eyes that can see as well as any insect's. But with its principal eyes, jumping spiders see the world better than cats, dogs or other animals, at least within a narrow focal range that makes it a nimble hunter.
And some jumping spiders have extraordinary color vision. UC was part of a National Science Foundation effort to study the vision of some of the 6,000 species of jumping spiders found around the world.
“There was one species we only found in piles of bones in South Africa,” Morehouse said. “It was a bit of a treasure hunt.”
In his lab, Morehouse and his students use a process called microspectrophotometry to measure wavelengths of light absorbed by cone cells in the spiders' retinas. While most spiders can see only a few colors on the spectrum between ultraviolet and green, some jumping spiders can see many others, including reds, oranges and yellows. And they do so in surprising ways.
But can the spiders with the cells for color vision actually see those colors?
To find out, Morehouse and his research partners came up with an ingenious system in which they suspended the spiders in front of a screen and gave them a large ball that they held with their eight legs.
When a subtly colored shape floated across the screen in front of them, the spiders who could observe the color moved the ball like a gyroscope to try to follow the moving image.
Researchers think spiders evolved sophisticated color vision, at least in part, to help them avoid toxic prey.
In another experiment, researchers applied gray paint to some termites and red paint to others. On the red-painted termites, they also applied a bitter tasting solution. Spiders released into the termite enclosure quickly learned to avoid the red-colored termites, hunting only the tasty gray-colored ones, which suggested their color vision helped them make the distinction.
Morehouse said there is still much to learn about the fascinating ways we and other animals perceive the world.
“If we owe anything to the world, it's to allow the world to be experienced in the fullness of itself,” Morehouse said. “I think one of the tragedies of extinction is the loss of a totally unique way of experiencing our world, a way of experiencing our world in a way we probably couldn't even imagine.”
Featured image at top: UC Associate Professor Nathan Morehouse sweeps a net to catch jumping spiders in tall grass. Photo/Day’s Edge Productions and Veritasium, Inc.
UC biologist Nathan Morehouse is studying the vision of jumping spiders. Photo/Day’s Edge Productions and Veritasium, Inc.
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