I've seen another study, which in my opinion is way more useful, where they are able to control a cockroaches using electrical pulses on their antennas. With a camera attached to its back, these cockroachs will be able to find people underneath rubbles.
That's the only image stuck in my head since reading the headline. Glad to see they are in fact reality. Such a great movie, except the ten minutes of ruby rod screaming.
Could a cockroach carry both the cockroach control device and the camera? Does the micro camera have enough low light capabilities to be useful in the dark? Are there any animal ethics to be taken into consideration for attempting this route?
I can’t tell if that idea is 2 years or 20 years in the future, but it sounds neat.
You'd probably be better off using a microphone if we are taking about search in low light conditions. Or maybe a CO2 sensor, if you can miniaturize it enough.
But I'm not so sure it's that much better than dogs for search and rescue. Much more promising for surveillance.
Just ignore it whenever researchers say their thing could be used for search and resuce. Nearly every fun robot invention is promoted as having that purpose, probably because the inventors can't really think of an actual use but they still realize it's cool.
R2R, or Roach 2 Roach would be more apt. Jokes aside, this tech later applied to other animals, say that pesky 2 legged kind could make for a rather interesting future.
Interesting. That OV06948 camera is also 40k (200x200) pixels, 30fps, and RGB. Critically, the page you link lists its weight at 0.87g = 870mg, which would make it 157x denser than lead.[1] The actual spec sheet says 0.87 mg, i.e. less than one milligram, which is incredible.[2] It has up to a 4 meter range, which I understand to be wired, so it would still need some sort of transmitter.
The camera used by these researchers, including its lens and panning head, is 200 mg (77 for the sensor and lens and mount, 7 mg bluetooth chip, and 96 mg boost converter). It's only 20k (160x120) resolution, monochrome. It has a wireless 120 m range.
The killer, however, seems to be power. The 10 mAh battery alone weighs 500 mg, which means the 200 mg vs <1 mg comparison becomes more like 700 vs 501.
The OV06948's power usage is 25 mW, which means a 10 mAh / (25 mW / 3.3 V) = 1.32 hour runtime, capturing 142k frames of video. The bug rig gets 6 hours, capturing only 108,000 frames of video. Perhaps you could get longer battery life out of the OV06948 if you slowed the framerate.
Unfortunately this seems outside the bounds for ambient RF energy harvesting, even if you don’t mind dropping a few frames to charge back up if the capacitor runs low.
The rectenna would have to be much too large to produce anywhere near 25mW even at a 10% duty cycle.
I suppose if you didn’t mind ramping the RF output power way up you could shrink the antenna size, but not much smaller than 1cm^2 I think.
Co-author here. One of our primary constraints was power usage. I’m not sure exactly why, but the camera we used, by Himax, uses much less power than any omnivision camera we were aware of.
Last time I spoke to Omnivision they wouldn't even consider a purchase order (from an R&D company) unless we were buying 2k units. So don't bother unless you're building consumer electronics.
Other companies like e2v do have sampling packs available for most of their standard sensors, and they're pretty friendly. Not quite so small though!
Could you use an array of these mounted at precise, known, differing angles and an FPGA to calculate high resolution localised depth maps? Applications you say? Entomological gesture studies!
Am I the only one who finds this enslaving of living things troublesome?
I mean livestock enslavement is problematic, but the necessity for food could 'morally compensate' for it. Plus originally these animals were part of the family. Industrialization kinda blew the whole balance there. But again, feeding people is a necessity so while I can argue against excessive use of livestock, I find it morally ambivalent.
But this doesn't come out of any necessity. What uses are there for this? I bet 90% of usage for this is Surveillance.
So we enslave living things just to enhance enslavement of human beings.
I don't know, this feels very off.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the use of the word "enslavement". Anti-specism is an opinion, a framework of thought that I find wrong, and that I believe is going in the wrong direction. I do consider myself superior to animals, and would be ready to sacrifice a large number of animals to save one human life.
While slavery is wrong, the semantic parallel you're building between slavery and scientific research on animals devalues the horror of being owned, lived by actual human beings.
There needs to be more debate and measure in the way we present animal pain and animal exploitation, which I believe are both acceptable. I wouldn't hit my dog! But I understand that we need to put down dogs in animal shelters without calling it a mass murder.
When you say "livestock enslavement is problematic" you're stating an opinion as if it were a fact.
However, I completely agree with you with the fact that we should limit this type of surveillance-focused research, which could end up in net negative happiness in the world.
Maybe because it's the most commonly used terminology in this context? Trying to attribute some hidden opinion to the author's use of a contextually common synonym (instead of the one you would prefer) seems a bit weird to me.
Because when my dog is old and he is in pain and it won't get any better, I want to gently, let him go, to put him down/to rest. I don't want to 'kill' him. That's what the police would do to someone's innocent dog. Words have emotional connotations.
Which absolutely has nothing to do with "animal pain and animal exploitation", which the GP believes is acceptable, and was using the killing of their dog, somehow as .. I'm not sure how their argument works, because obviously the way we exploit animals is nothing like the way we would gently send a puppy to their final resting place in puppy heaven.
“Euthanize” implies an often tough decision to end a condition of prolonged suffering that has little hope for improvement. “Kill” does not imply any such decision
Do you mean the exponentially successful increase in happiness, life expectancy, creativity, exploration, science and much more that the human race has accomplished?
I don't even think I contributed anything yet but I'm proud and wish for it to continue. Feel free to have a negative outlook on the achievements and impact of your species, but please, realize that it's simply your own opinion. Not everything is perfect! Climate change is a horrible byproduct of our presence and action. But wow, look how far we've arrived! How far we'll still go!
But how far? And by what measure? If we had awe-inspiring technological progress, but only increased the suffering of sentient beings, is that a win? Or is somehow scientific understanding, in and of itself, a worthwhile pursuit, and damn the consequences?
As it stands, we don't really have an accurate hedonic utilitarian measure we can use to decide if sentient beings are better off, even for humans. Though a cursory search leads me to the 'Gross National Well-being' measure, but such self-surveys aren't known to be reliable.
The irony is that many people who really believe in the potential of humanity to create huge futures full of happiness and bliss are the ones who are most concerned about our survival. There are obviously different opinions on the degree of our survival chances but reasonable people have put it as low as 1/6. That means a f*cking dice roll could put a stop to all the progress you have been lauding about. Don’t get me wrong... I am an optimist, I want to creat a great future and lift the potential that is there. I would wager I probably see more potential than most. BUT we will have to radically transform how our societies operate, how we care about each other (including non-human animals), how we care about our planet, and what role we see ourselves having in the future.
Humans are superior to animals in many ways, but many animals feel pain as readily as humans and have instincts that are frustrated when we use them. Ie, they suffer because of what we do to them. It seems silly to get stuck on a point about whether or not slavery is exactly the right word for it.
I don't get this obsession with suffering from antispecists. Suffering is an evolutive adaptation. Suffering of a cow is certainly very similar to suffering of a human being, but suffering of an ant? Probably not.
Then why should suffering modes similar to us should be the measure of everything? I don't see the point. This all really sounds like bad anthropomorphism to me, and a very poor philosophy. I don't understand how it got so trendy, except as a side effect of individualism gone wrong.
You're mistaken. Noxiception is the evolutionary adaptation. That is the response of an organism to a potentially hazardous stimulus. Sometimes called "pain response", but it's not suffering.
> Suffering of a cow is certainly very similar to suffering of a human being, but suffering of an ant? Probably not.
Probably probably probably probably. You know science?
So noxiception has been proven in organisms as simple as C. Elegans.
Suffering has been proven in organisms as simple as snails. They were subjected to painful but non-damaging stimuli (hot needle) for a prolonged period of time and this measurably reduced their ability to learn (learning very simply maze puzzles, which snails can do). It paints a pretty clear picture of trauma.
Out of your insulting tone (I should frankly tell you to GFY), that doesn't explain the less why "pain" should be the measure of all things. And recently plants have been showed to display response to aggression, too. So far this is all a bunch of smug, moralistic bullshit that leads nowhere.
I actually tried to explain what you can measure beyond simply "pain" (noxiception) about suffering. Because like you said, noxiception is present in many organisms and in many cases it can be (IMO very reasonably) argued they are simple stimulus-response mechanisms (without moral value), while in other cases (say, a dog suffering) it can be (also reasonably) argued that there are more complex things going on and morality comes into play.
The question is where to draw the line, which is hard. But you can estimate bounds of what constitutes suffering. I agree that merely having a specific response to a noxic stimulus isn't suffering. But I do believe that the fact that you can (long-term) damage the learning ability of a snail by applying otherwise non-harmful (but painful) stimuli, is something that at least to me comes awfully close to what I'd consider psychological trauma in a human. So it's not really a matter that it responds to some stimulus (like plants), but that the way in which it does shows a higher level function that to me seems somewhat analogous to how we suffer.
Doesn't tell me where exactly to draw the line, but does give me a clearer picture somewhat, at least leads me somewhere further than simply "does it have a pain-response?".
I thought I was pretty reserved. While I believe this is enslavement, I explicitly talked about the moral ambivalencey of it when it comes to animals.
I didn't advocate a black and white approach of, using animals=evil.
I agree with most of what you say, I just think we should always ask ourselves these questions instead of blindly admiring the technical achievement, comfort, etc.
It's a matter of respect for the universe, part of the respect is aknoweldging that killing is part of this universe, but we should be thoughtful about it. And understand necessities vs excessiveness. It seems you do purposely think about these things, so I've got no qualms with you :)
> There needs to be more debate and measure in the way we present animal pain and animal exploitation, which I believe are both acceptable. I wouldn't hit my dog! But I understand that we need to put down dogs in animal shelters without calling it a mass murder.
> When you say "livestock enslavement is problematic" you're stating an opinion as if it were a fact.
No but it IS a fact, if you agree you wouldn't hit your dog, I suppose that when you "put it down", you would also prefer to do it painlessly instead of giving it to a slaughterhouse that operates on such a scale that it can't quite 100% guarantee your dog might not dangle half-alive on a meat hook for a minute (or other types of accidents that definitely do happen).
If you agree that treating a dog like that IS problematic, we're doing this to animals that are literally just as intelligent and loving as dogs (namely, pigs), on a massive industrial scale.
Sure, I also consider myself sufficiently superior to animals to justify eating them.
But the way they are treated in the bio industry is absolutely problematic, for a various number of reasons actually.
Interesting. If you are up to critically reflect your own perspective, let‘s start a discussion on your rejection of anti-speciesism.
First of all, let us clarify what anti-speciesism means so that we are on the same page here and don‘t fight with windmills that don‘t exist.
Anti-speciesisim is the position that one should not discriminate on the basis of species as it is not a morally relevant criterion for making destinctions between living beings. The argument is that similar to the color of skin, there is nothing that we inherently value in being a member of a specific species. What we generally care about are other more fundamental criteria such as ability to feel pleasure and pain or some other criteria that could be a plausible source of value (e.g., potential to create value in the world which could be proxied by intelligence). Thus, it is totally possible to be anti-speciesist and still value human beings more than other animals based on the understanding that we are different in our ability to feel pleasure and pain or create value in the world. Moreover, in your post you have not made any argument which would put anti-speciesim per se into question.
Of course, you could argue that there is an inherent difference between non-human and human animals but you still need to define what that criterion is. If you believe in an evolutionary world view species doesn‘t seem like a good candidate since we basically randomly evolved from other animals and it would be totally unclear from which point on we were worthy of moral consideration. It seems much more likely that you care about something else then species but I am open to hear your side on the argument.
Now, where you probably see a difference to most anti-speciesists is the degree to which you want to give recognition to the moral value of non-human animals. For anti-speciesists, how much moral concern we should have for an animal is generally an empirical question that is based on some definition of cognitive function. Going down this route has the nice property of making things emendable to a grounded discussion about facts rather than just moral intuitions.
To sum up, I think you should really reconsider your position on anti-speciesism as it is a pretty defensible and logical position to take if you are inclined toward a scientific world view that recognizes evolutionary theory.
Regarding the moral question of using animals for food production if we don‘t have to (and trust me, we don‘t need to rely on almost all of the billions of animals we are slaughtering every year for reasons of tradition or taste), I can also recommend the following short video (2 min) on a thought experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSUz6Rj5oo4
I think you've not read much literature from the animal welfare movement (aka 'animal right'). Consider reading the classic 'Animal Liberation' by Peter Singer. You would benefit from reading others' thoughts on this and thinking more deeply about the issue.
You claim "feeding people is a necessity" and that it somehow balances out what we do to animals. You certainly know people can live well without animal parts in their diet. Even if by some bizarre reason humans required animal flesh in their mouths, it wouldn't imply that doing anything we want to animals would be appropriate.
Torturing a cow for 1 year wouldn't be appropriate if we could get the same cow meat without the torture.
Please learn about how animals are treated before you "find it morally ambivalent"
Vegan diets cause malnutrition and perhaps even psychological changes.
Due to the suffering of wild animals, eating beef is probably net negative for total animal suffering because a cow only has 1 brain for a ton of biomass.
You make a very bold claim that vegan diets cause malnutrition. You probably don't mean to say vegan diets inherently do this -- simply that many people who try don't know how to balance their diet, right?
Let's assume for the sake of argument that malnutrition cuts a human life short by 1 year. Does this now justify torturing hundreds of animals for hundreds of years?
I'm trying to nudge people to think of any argument that results in "we can now torture animals".
At this current time, we don't need to abuse animals to eat animals, we only do it because it's cheaper. I doubt many people in company of family and friends could say 'saving $1' justifies torturing animals.
Moralizing is a race to the bottom. If you think that the existence of life on Earth is the paramount moral good and are e.g. willing to fly on a plane, you are a hypocrite.
I don't agree. I do think certain schools of moralistic thought fall down this path.
But it's not mendatory.
If we relax our need for dichotomy, while encouraging contemplation this is less of a problem.
What is "necessary"? I, too, regard global warming as the biggest threat to our species. I still don't think that makes someone a hypocrite for flying.
I think maintaining a quality of life for humanity is necessary. Sacrificing everything in the name of the environment is paperclip maximizing - what we really want is to find the optimal level of attention to the environment that gives us the best value over time.
I personally don't have a strong opinion here but do feel like most people lose track of the global picture yet get fixated on individual problems. I think this happens because we don't have a measure of the impact of our activity, we just vaguely feel like some actions are "good" and some "bad".
Corny example, recycling is considered "good", yet still has a net negative impact, but for most people it's enough to feel good and stop worrying.
Very few things are strictly necessary, but many are definitely unnecessary: perverted maximisation of profits, planned obsolescence, avoidable food waste etc. Tech example: avoidable software bloat causing global increase in energy consumption.
Insects are (more than likely) too simple to have a perception of suffering, so I don't consider morals to apply to them any more than to a plant. I can't give an exact cutoff on the chain of complexity but you wouldn't moralize a petri dish.
Excellent work. I'm old enough to remember when putting wireless vision systems on a robot required a kilogram at least :-). Of course this would be made even simpler if you integrated the vision sensor, the BLE radio, and the control system into a single die. Something that would be quite accessible to nation states and sufficiently bored billionaires. Ambient energy harvesting has also made great strides so the days of persistent and difficult detect surveillance are getting closer.
With high power towers for cell network and plenty of devices that emit radio, you can have a wireless power harvester that can be powered forever if you lower you energy consumption below a given threshold.
Also was an experiment a while ago where photons were both feeding the camera sensor and used to get the image itself. Granted resolution and clarity was bad but the images still could be used to recognize stuff. Combine that with a smart AI at receiver site and you can have full surveillance, at least for counting bodies (humans + cars) for your desired place (think gathering places like Tienanmen).
If it's remotely possible I can almost guarantee the three letter agencies around the world are using it already (or have tried).
MI5 were lifting encryption keys via acoustic analysis of typing something like 65 years ago [Wright, Spycatcher]. And their budget was fairly limited, as opposed to the US agencies with their basically unlimited budgets (i.e. NRO)
I'm less concerned about the bug than the tiny remote camera with 6 hours of battery-powered live streaming capability from up to 120 meters distance. I'm concerned about more surveillance devices becoming smaller and pervasive. I hear this dismissal of "be more concerned about smartphones" frequently though. We can be equally worried about both can't we?
I don't think camera system size has been limiting factor in surveillance for a while. For robotics (either walking or flying) the locomotion and power are more restricting aspects, and using live insects for surveillance seems too slow and unpredictable to be useful.
If they cheap enough, imagine the fun of trying to secure government sites against everything from random conspiracy nuts to journalists and state actors when you need to secure it against something bug sized entering...
OK kids, I need help here. There was a sci-fi novel, probably the sixties, called something like "little bugs have little bugs on them". The premise was basically that.. A cold war where one side puts bugs on the bugs of the other side. Rings any bells? Potentially there were also some aspects of bug driven assassinations... But I am unsure. This thing been bugging me.
I think I may have found it on the wikipedia page for nanotechnology in fiction:
> The 1984 novel Peace on Earth by Stanislaw Lem tells about small bacteria-sized nanorobots looking as normal dust (developed by artificial intelligence placed by humans on the Moon in the era of cold warfare) that has later came to Earth and are replicating, destroying all weapons, modern technology and software, leaving living organisms (as there were no living organisms on the Moon) intact.
It's not a perfect match for your description, nor is it from the 60s, but it was the closest match I could find. Is that the book you were thinking of?
OK. The plot thickens. https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/big-fleas-have-little-fl... so .. this is the phrase I remember. Probably the "motto" used by the SF author. Now I remember Peace on earth... and BTW à propos the article cited .. the spy bugs there have very partial vision .. and if I remember correctly they recompose scenes from the multitude of images... I think this is as far as I am going to get. Thank you!
Am I the only one here at least considering the ethical aspect of attaching some device to an insect?
Maybe I'm sentimental and contradictory because when I drive a car over the Autobahn I'm killing hundreds of insects in an hour. At the same time I cannot harm a bug intentionally.
this is much better than previous things i've seen that implanted electrodes in the brains of cockroaches and used electrical impulses to steer them around.
I can relate, but considering how much we exploit animals, including agricultural animals, breeding, raising and killing animals for food, using rats and monkeys for testing etc., this would not surface in the priority list for fighting animal welfare for me for a very, very long time. Even in thought.
I agree - there's a big difference between the ability of various species to experience suffering or to experience happiness, and I think that has an impact on the ethics of how we treat them. Humans, monkeys, pigs, dogs, etc. are definitely social/emotional intelligences that deserve better treatment than we give them. Rats? Chickens? Insects? Jellyfish? Plants? Bacteria? Somewhere on that spectrum I cease to worry about the suffering of the animal and worry more about those affected by it.
That's so ignorant. How can we possibly know how other animals experience pain or suffering? You just assume that the further you diverge from us in the animal kingdom the less animals are able to suffer. That certainly makes things easier.
I think a lot of it has to do with the means of reproduction of the animal. One might make an argument that [r-type species](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory#r-selec...) have decimating loss factored into their everyday experience and survival strategy. As a different commenter pointed out, driving a car down a highway kills hundreds of insects. As a practical matter, insects are the most successful clade ever, with the largest biodiversity, largest number of individuals, and largest biomass of any land animals (by far). If the end is to reduce human impact on ecosystems, then farming insects seems like a reasonable trade off from a utilitarian perspective.
There has been a ton of research into how different animals experience pain. You are correct that we don't know how they experience it, but based on nervous system structure and other behavior, we can make some conclusions about the nature of the pain and whether it's a basic avoidance mechanism or something more complex that would involve suffering.[1]
That said, I think a good rule is to not cause unnecessary pain/suffering in any living thing (e.g. if trapping rodents, use something that leads to a humane death).
I think the assumption that anything with a brain can experience pain, suffering and happiness is a pretty safe one. Synthesising information to decide what is suffering and happiness, and then trying to maximise happiness, seems to be one of the basic functions of any brain.
It's like killing a spider in the house. Killing it instead of taking it outside doesn't bring me any benefit the way eating a chicken does, so why kill it? Just like putting the camera rig on an actual beetle for the demo doesn't bring a benefit, so why do it?
I think this is just a reflection of your personality. Respecting nature, small or big and taking the time to give it space, let’s you value and organise your life in a more balanced fashion.
That’s only true if your time has no value. Killing is faster. Also, as someone who has gotten multiple infections from non-venomous spider bites, I can tell you catch and release is riskier than killing.
Attaching a camera to an insect is probably not even a blip on the radar of a university ethics board compared to all the mammals that are used and killed annually in various experiments.
You also kill billions of bacteria without even knowing it... and of course every time you wash your hands, which I hope is a frequent occurrence in these times.
I imagine there will be all sorts of uses out of the ordinary for things like this. Study insects in the wild. Rescue missions in destroyed buildings. Land on a window and voyeur. Go into Area 51 see what is happening. Murder by poison in the night. AI trained software these bugs roaming the crops AI reporting back weeds pests and health of the plants, sewer exploration, bug races for entertainment, just to run a bug up your sisters leg and video it to Youtube. I could go on so let us hope these come available for all of us not just spooks.
> The power system is the primary limitation here, but it might be possible to use a solar cell to cut down on battery requirements ... with a long-range wireless link and a vision system, it’s possible to add sophisticated vision-based autonomy to tiny robots by doing the computation remotely
Since WiFi can be used to see through walls and ceilings of buildings and homes, using low-cost passive sensors, such devices can be autonomously navigated. E.g. for indoor use, knowing light source locations for charging and camouflage.
> our dataset provides a collection of Wi-Fi signals that are recorded for 40 different pairs of subjects while performing twelve two-person interactions. The presented dataset can be exploited to advance Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition in different aspects, such as the use of various machine learning algorithms to recognize different human-to-human interactions.
Once they get it down to flying insects, would it be possible to deploy a swarm of these (thousands) and use positioning data to generate high resolution 3D imagery?
It would be a very hard challenging to build a high resolution image from several low level images. I haven’t heard of any similar work. This is an interesting problem space.
Hopefully the smaller it gets the less power it needs, the easier it is to power using environmental factors like wind, earths magnetic fields and the movement of the insect in such a scenario.
The movie "Eye in the sky" isn't far from reality where they used a bug-like drone to spy on POI, except its drone's framerate and resolution are exaggerated.
I saw "steerable" and was hoping they had wired something up the pleasure centers of the insect's brains so they they could steer them around like little RC vehicles. (nope... they can only point the camera)
I believe I saw somewhere they did that with rats. Fascinating, and yet so f'd up.
The title made it sound like a fly or an ant, but in reality it’s a rather large beetle. It’s neat work though.
For a redteam project, I once made a spy camera that fit in a belt buckle. I’m not sure you’ll need to worry about surveillance implications of insect-mounted cameras; surveillance is already pervasive.
Imagine releasing the bug near a restricted area. The attacker can hope it gets past security and gain images from inside the restricted area. If it gets caught then the attacker if up to 120M away, which is a good head start.
Good point. The maximum distance the attacker could be would be limited by the act of releasing an insect and the biological limitations of insects (lifespan, travel speed), not by the range of the wireless communication.
I wonder what sort of "video" you could get from the insects' visual systems. Maybe there's no imaging per se, just a bunch of feature-detection stuff. And in any case, it won't likely happen any time soon.
Unless they've managed to somehow hook the output of the cam to the cortex of the bug thereby allowing it to do things it previously couldn't, I find the article a tad disappointing: this is one huge bug. Does it even fly?
It’s possible to remote control a cockroach sized bot, so now you can be a sort of “fly on the wall” in any conversation. Drop the roach off by drone which can double up as the access point.
If ever there was a time when ethics is need in engineering decisions, it's now (for years, I've preached that ethics ought to be part of engineering courses).
In various posts years ago I predicted that this spying/privacy scenario wound happen comparatively soon, now it has happened. I then said to the effect that how is 'security' going to check every bug or fly that flies into a military research establishment and sits on a loaf of bread in the staff canteen and then proceeds to listen to scientists discussing secret info.
It's bloody nightmare I recon, and methinks it'll only get much worse. Heavens knows where the endpoint of this is likely to be.
No, considering how large that thing on the bug is, and how easily it would be seen, it would need to be much closer to something in order to see anything. It would be cheaper/more effective to simply use normal means.
Moore's Law doesn't really work anymore. It hasn't held for the last 4 years, IIRC. That's why a lot of focus has been on multicore systems to try and get new speedups based on parallel computing as opposed to getting purely single-chip improvements.
They are, but performance in teraflops is not the same as performance in general computing activities. We are now scaling horizontally within a single cpu package.
Often they can survive quite a while without food or water, as long as the temperature and humidity are within some fairly generous extremes, although very dry air poses the risk of dehydration since their respiratory systems and body volume offer little ability to retain a reserve. But they rarely have to go that long without a meal, because if a spider can get in, so can suitably sized prey - and will. Next time you find yourself wondering how a spider thrives in an empty room, take a close look at and under her web. Most likely you'll find cocooned prey in both places - fresher prey items in the web, spent ones underneath it.
Spinning a web is a metabolically very expensive process, requiring as it does a great deal of protein - protein which can only be recovered by either eating the spun silk again, or eating prey trapped by it. Spiders consequently have to be pretty smart about where and how they do it, because the ones who aren't tend not to reproduce. So it's usually a very safe bet that, wherever you see a spider web, it's there because that's where the prey tends to be. It can be interesting to see what sort of prey that is - for example, right now in the basement of my ~130-year-old house there are a couple of very happy cellar spiders enjoying a steady diet of pill bugs, and another by the kitchen radiator who all on her own solved most of an ant problem for me before I ever realized I had it.
They're actually very desirable animals to have around, in my thoroughly considered opinion, despite getting about as bad a name as wasps - and with just as little reason.
wow had no idea they eat the silk. They are so small that I only notice them because of the webs and long strands flying around. I'll keep an eye out for their prey :) Thanks for that interesting info filled comment!
Generally, there' a tradeoff between quality vs size (mostly through energy: processing and sending more data needs more energy, which needs a bigger power source).
Presumably they also picked some reasonably available and suitable parts and tried what they can get, so there might be room for improvements now there is a baseline established.
I'be been banging on about MOOP - Massive open online psychology- where we basically monitor our daily interactions such as conversations with kids partners etc, and build a society wide set of best practises and can then be guided in real time by these best practises (if you have ever seen those shows where a Nanny lives full time for a week with a family that the kind of thing)
But it only works if the data is treated medically. we won't ever stop the three letter agencies from abusing it (entirely) but we need to make PII more than GDPR and make it as sacrosanct in law as lawyer client / doctor patient confidentiality.
My take on this is that old saw - the great ideas seem like bad ideas to most other people.
We are already in a surveillance society, and it is not going away, so it needs to have benefits for us or it is just dystopia all the way.
At the moment the average school leaving age in the UK just became 21 as now 59% of leavers attend university. We are educated / trained for the first 1/4 of our lives - but the remaining 3/4 ? We need life long learning but that does not happen in a classroom - it's most effective right at the moment we need it - and what delivery mechanism exists - there is one in every pocket.
And it's not good to anyone just to straight up insult other posters. Honestly, I am happy for folks to disagree but try and figure out why you disagree with me - express your thoughts.
