Spiders are capable of complex and beautiful engineering, and their web structures have fired and fascinated the human imagination for millennia. Now a detailed analysis is available on this.  A team of scientists deployed AI and a night vision camera during the construction of a web to study every position of all eight of a spider’s legs. Based on the posture of the spider’s legs, the result is a model that can predict the stages of web building.
This will help the scientists find out what’s going on in the tiny spider brains when they work away, spinning in the dark. According to one of the scientists, they have now defined the entire choreography for web building. This was never done before for any animal architecture. None of the other animals or birds who build their own houses is as intricate, varied, or beautiful as the webs of spiders.
Uloborus diversus is a member of a family of spiders known as hackled orb weavers, which is at the heart of the attempt to build a library of spider web-building movements. These spiders can be found in the US and Mexico and are just a few millimeters across in size. To trap their prey, they build intricate webs. Most orb-weavers are primarily active during the spring and summer, but Uloborus diversus are active throughout the year. Due to their prolonged activity, small size, and tolerance of conspecifics, scientists choose for research.
For the recording process, six spiders were enlisted. The scientists recorded these spiders each night, using infrared cameras and lights as they built their webs. They used limb-tracking neural networks to monitor 26 points on each spider’s body. It was too difficult for the scientists to annotate the leg points that go through every frame by hand, so machine vision software was trained to detect the posture of the spider, frame by frame. The purpose was to document everything the legs do to build an entire web.
In this way, the scientists recorded the hours-long construction of 21 webs and each arachnid body movement that went into said construction. How the spider’s tiny brains can support the complexity of web building this the 1st step towards recording.  It was found that each spider’s web-making process involved the same motor skills and motions. Just from the position of a leg part of the web under construction could be predicted.
Spiders’ rules to build the web are the same, even if the final structure is a little different. They are using the same rules, and this indicates that the rules are encoded in their brains. Now the scientists want to know how those rules are encoded at the level of neurons, and this will be the subject for next research. Scientists want to put the spiders under the influence of mind-altering chemicals. The purpose is to find out which parts of the brain help in the web-building process and how. Subsequent behavioral analysis and pharmaceutical delivery would be needed to infer how drug-induced changes in behavior lead to altered web architecture.
