【Pretty Mother in law】

Source：Exquisite Information Network Editor：Life Time：2025-06-26 17:12:21

The Pretty Mother in lawnext time you spot a spider hanging upside down in your apartment, it might actually be snoozing somewhat like humans.

Behavioral ecologist Daniela Rößler made this accidental finding when she first observed jumping spiders dangling in her laboratory in 2020. Rößler and her research team recently publishedtheir findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Rößler, a researcher at the University of Konstanz in Germany, originally set out to study predator-prey interactions in spiders. She used baby spiders for her experiment, and opportunistically filmed the animals at night using an infrared camera.

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The spiders exhibited something like rapid eye movements (REM), a behavior we and many animals often experience when sleeping. During REM, activities in the body such as heart rate escalate, while the eyes remain closed and move rapidly.

SEE ALSO: A big spider will spread in the U.S. No, it won't 'parachute' down.

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While watching the spiders, the research team also observed the animals occasionally twitching their limbs, another classic REM behavior. Together, these findings suggest that a dreamy, sleep-like state could exist in spiders. There is already evidence fruit flies sleep. But this is the first time the REM pattern was documented in a jumping spider, said Rößler.

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But what looks like sleep to us may or may not be sleep in spiders. Though the research team’s findings very much suggest that spiders do sleep, the evidence isn't yet certain, noted Rößler.

"If we really want to understand the function of sleep, we need to look at it where it happens."

As an extension of this research, Rößler is planning to conduct sleep studies in a field atmosphere as opposed to capturing spiders and studying them in an artificial lab environment. "If we really want to understand the function of sleep, we need to look at it where it happens," she explained.

Yet the lab setting still produced compelling results. It is awell donestudy that has documented twitching in spiders, said Mark Blumberg, a professor at the University of Iowa who researches twitching and REM sleep in rats and human infants. Blumberg was not part of this newly published study.

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【Pretty Mother in law】

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