You may be familiar with drunk insects if you've fished them out of a beer or wine glass - because yes, six- and eight-legged animals also react to the toxins in various drugs. But you can't really do much with small, staggering bees, but things get more interesting with spiders. You can tell that these arachnids have secretly smoked weed - on their webs!
Please build your nets earlier!
The idea of giving drugs to spiders came about decades ago, in 1948 to be precise, when the Swiss pharmacologist Peter N. Witt began his research into the effects of drugs on spiders - because they only wove webs in the middle of the night!
His colleague at the time, the zoologist HM Peters, was bothered by the fact that the garden spiders he wanted to observe always built their webs between 2 and 5 a.m. And who wants to get up in the middle of the night to watch spiders?
So to get the spiders to start building earlier, Witt gave them a variety of psychoactive drugs, including amphetamine, mescaline, strychnine, LSD and caffeine and found: Nope, the spiders stuck to their fixed spinning times, but something else turned up: Depending Drug changed the size and structure of their webs!
How do you give drugs to spiders?
No, you don't give them a joint! Witt dissolved the drugs in sugar water and put a drop of each solution into the spider's mouth. It is unknown whether he stroked them so they wouldn't be afraid. In later studies, the spiders were fed with anesthetized flies, which in hindsight is the easier method - try hitting a spider's mouth with a pipette!
The spiders' webs were photographed before and after, and the result is astonishing: both Witt's results and those of NASA, which repeated the experiments in 1995 , are very similar!
How spiders build webs on drugs
So let's take a look at the results of the various studies:
A spider on LSD

Spiders on LSD build more geometric webs, but for some reason forget about the intermediate threads in most of the web.
A spider on marijuana

Stoned spiders seem to give up their web in the middle. According to the NASA study, the spiders were easily distracted by web building and did not want to finish building. It is unknown whether they also developed the typical cravings.
A spider on chloral hydrate

The spiders that were fed chloral hydrate gave up their webs even faster than the stoned spiders - which is no surprise, since it is a sleeping pill, which apparently also works on the arachnids.
A spider on caffeine

What wakes you up makes spiders go crazy: there's no real pattern to be seen anymore, they just weave wherever they want.
A spider on benzendrin

Benzendrin was originally developed to treat asthma, but students quickly recognized its awakening effect and improvements in cognitive performance. In fact, the spiders also worked on the webs with a lot of energy, but without much planning and they also got lost in the details.
In 1971, Witt published his 22 years of research entitled “ Drugs alter web-building of spiders: A review and evaluation .”
Why do we give spiders drugs anyway?
NASA, which replicated Witt's experiments in 1995 and evaluated them with computers, actually did so not out of boredom, but for a specific reason: the researchers explained that this approach to toxicity testing was an alternative to testing harmful chemicals on so-called "higher animals." which, in their opinion, are “increasingly restricted by law”.
In other words: animal experiments should also be possible with spiders: you give them a chemical and then use their web structure to analyze how toxic a lipstick is, for example.
I know what you're thinking now.
How do you put lipstick on a spider??? I'll leave that to your imagination!
Additional sources: Rare Historical Photos , Newsweek
Also interesting:
The idea alone should give you a lot of horror: Apparently we eat an average of 8 spiders a year while we sleep.
What do the crawlers want in our mouths? Or will a spider… er… a bear be tied to us? - Bon appetit! Do we really eat 8 spiders a year while we sleep?
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