They see these movements of the eyes, and they immediately jump to dreaming, and I just think that's a bridge too far for this stage of the research. KELLY: As for the question - do spiders dream? - Blumberg is skeptical.īLUMBERG: People - when they look at rapid eye movements, what they see is a visual system being activated. SUMMERS: Now, Blumberg was not involved in the work, but he says studying these behaviors across the animal kingdom might someday tell us more about how REM sleep evolved. What we want to know at some fundamental level is - why do these animals do this? MARK BLUMBERG: These behaviors themselves are just - you know, if I can say so - they're just beautiful behaviors. But even these early findings are exciting to sleep scientists like Mark Blumberg at the University of Iowa. KELLY: Now, Roessler cautions it's too early to say whether the spiders are technically asleep during these rapid eye movements. SUMMERS: The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We would see that always, when this happened, we also detected quite significant and very obvious eye movements. ROESSLER: All the legs would curl into the body, and they would twitch while doing that. SUMMERS: Well, by filming baby jumping spiders at night, Roessler says her team was able to detect periods of REM-like activity. KELLY: That is the phase of human sleep where our bodies are immobilized, but our eyes dart quickly, and we can have really visual dreams. At night, they seem to enter a state resembling rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM sleep. She and her colleagues have now discovered something else intriguing about these spiders. They've been shown to be really smart and to do really smart things.ĭaniela Roessler is a behavioral ecologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany. Many of them fit on the tip of a finger, and they sport fuzzy, colorful bodies, big eyes.ĭANIELA ROESSLER: They have this incredible vision that is really not comparable with any other insects or arthropods. If you have ever seen a close-up photo of a jumping spider, you'll know they're the kind of cute ones.
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