The Institute for Figuring
Announces the third lecture in our Spring 2006 series
The Insect Trilogy

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A SPIDER
By Dr. Simon Pollard [IFF-16]
Wednesday, June 28 @ 7:30pm
Hosted at Telic Arts Exchange in Chinatown/ Los Angeles
975 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
A jumping spider watching a cartoon spider on TV attacks the virtual competitor as fiercely as if it were the real thing. Photo courtesy Dr. Duane Harland.


In the skies over Lake Victoria on the border of Kenya and Uganda swarms of lake flies mass in clouds so thick they block out the sun. From this dense throng a tiny jumping spider on the ground below can pick out a single mosquito – a hapless victim whose blood engorged stomach will serve as its next meal. Possessing almost feline hunting skills, jumping spiders can see better than any invertebrate and several orders of magnitude better than any other insect. Though their heads are far too tiny to contain a spherical eyeball, jumping spiders have developed eyes with an acuity on a par with mammals. Astonishingly, their miniscule brains can comprehend images on a television screen – a feat of mental processing previously thought impossible for an invertebrate mind.

Jumping spider of the species evarcha, sizing up a mosquito lure. All spiders are liquid feeders - they must liquify a meal before they can eat it. Most spiders do this by pumping their own stomach juices into the prey turning it into an extension of their own guts. Evarcha gets around this step by siphoning blood directly from the stomach of a freshly engorged mosquito. Photo courtesy Dr Simon Pollard.
Everything about a jumping spider’s vision system demands our admiration – beginning with the number of eyes. In addition to two forward facing lenses that jut out on stalks from the front of its head, a jumping spider has four peripheral eyes that enable it to see at the back of its head. The two front eyes operate on the same principle as a Galilean telescope, the result of the same evolutionary strategy to that taken by eagles and falcons. Information from all six eyes is processed by a brain that contains just a few hundred thousand neurons yet is capable of recognizing television pictures. In this lecture, Dr Simon Pollard will talk about the physics, neurology and perceptual psychology of how a spider sees the world.
A Singaporean jumping spider. Two front facing eyes are complemented by two other sets of eyes that allow the animal to see in 360 degree panoramic scope. Here, 4 of the 6 eyes are visible. Photo courtesy Dr Simon Pollard.

Dr Simon Pollard has been studying vision-based cognition in arachnids for over 25 years. In 2003 he and fellow New Zealander Dr Robert Jackson discovered a new species of jumping spider – evarcha – that feeds on the contents of a mosquito’s stomach. Pollard is Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch. The event will include films of spiders watching television and a screening of cartoons made specifically for an arachnid audience.

THE INSECT TRILOGY
#1 How Flies Fly – Dr. Michael Dickinson (Thurs, May 4)
#2 The Ecology of a Termite's Gut – Dr. Jared Leadbetter (Thurs, June 1)
#3 What is it Like to be a Spider – Dr. Simon Pollard (Wed, June 28)

The Institute For Figuring is a nonprofit organization devoted to enhancing the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques. This lecture series is hosted by Telic Arts Exchange and funded in part by a grant from the Annenberg Foundation.