In February, Japyassú and Kevin Laland, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Saint Andrews, proposed a bold answer to the question. “Where is it? Is it in her head, or does this information emerge during the interaction with the altered web?” When the spider was confronted with a problem to solve that it might not have seen before, how did it figure out what to do? “Where is this information?” he said. Their ability to recapitulate the ancient spiders’ innovation got Japyassú, a biologist at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil, thinking. But some could, and all at least began to reel it in with their two front legs. When a cricket got hooked, not all the orb spiders could fully pull it up, as a cobweb spider does. Then he snipped its threads so that the silk drooped to where crickets wandered below. He waited until the spiders wove an ordinary web. In 2008, the researcher Hilton Japyassú prompted 12 species of orb spiders collected from all over Brazil to go through this transition again.

Now their modern descendants, the cobweb spiders, dangle sticky threads below, wait until insects walk by and get snagged, and reel their unlucky victims in. Then they began building horizontal nets to use as a fishing platform. Before, they would wait for prey to become ensnared in their webs and then walk out to retrieve it. Millions of years ago, a few spiders abandoned the kind of round webs that the word “spiderweb” calls to mind and started to focus on a new strategy.

Richard lewis spiders