Talk:Spider behavior

This area seems to have fallen out of favor with researchers who publish. John Crompton's book, The Life of the Spiders got me interested from the minute I started reading it because it was written by a knowledgeable person about the creatures he had come to feel a great appreciation for. He was a British civil servant in the Far East who frequently had nothing better to do than watch the spiders on the wall of whatever official "guest house" he had lodged in while he was conducting official business for a day or two. He checked his information with scientists back in Great Britain, but he did not hold back from describing what he had seen, nor did he refrain from retelling stories he had learned about Fabre and other early scientific investigators. How many neurons constitute a normal spider brain? To me it is very interesting to see how some things some spiders do seem to involve intentions and even planning. One account of a Grammostola rosea that I read somewhere years ago said that one was put in a terrerium of some kind that had a bed of colored aquarium "stones" (glass beads, I suspect). The spider moved the stones around so that they were segregated by color. The chances of that kind of an arrangement occuring by chance is probably a little better than the chance that a gazillion monkeys could type out the sonnets of Shakespeare just by randomly pecking at keyboards. -- P0M

sections

• links to articles with interesting spider behavior (jumping spiders for example)
• general modes of behavior:
  • web building
  • "intelligence" in spiders
  • hunting behavior

maybe categorize "behavioral types" of spiders. --Sarefo 15:51, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

"The female tends to eat the male."

Are there any sources on this? The arachnologist Rod Crawford states that in the case of black widows, at least, this is a myth: http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/spidermyth/myths/blackwidow.html

I'm inclined to believe that without any sources, this is another urban legend which has snuck its way into beliefs about spiders. Aurora Musis amica (talk) 13:00, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

accuracy of leading statement

The opening paragraph states "They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species diversity among all other groups of organisms ....". Is this really true - were plants, fungi, bacteria, etc. considered? Perhaps "organisms" should be "animals"?__DrChrissy (talk) 20:57, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

References