A big reason these spiders were easier to work with was that Daniela didn’t need a permit to go to the Amazon rainforest to find them.ĭaniela Rößler: I could climb out my office window and collect 50 spiders and bring them in the lab, put them in little boxes and they'll still show behaviors that are pretty much close to their natural behaviors. But after her PhD was done, Daniela said she wanted to ask similar questions in a different-easier-model system, which led her to jumping spiders.
And she was studying this in colorful toads in the Amazon rainforest. She was studying things like camouflage and mimicry-for example, when a harmless animal looks like a dangerous animal to keep predators away. Her PhD focus was on how animal coloration impacts predator-prey relationships. Sam: Daniela told us that she didn’t start her research career studying sleeping spiders, or spiders at all. Daniela is a behavioral ecologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany and a guest researcher with Max Plank Institute, also in Germany. To learn about the sleeping spiders we called up Daniela Rößler, the lead author on the study that inspired the “Do spiders dream of eight-legged sheep?” headline. And like I mentioned I am so fascinated by sleep and dreaming and I feel like there’s a lot of misinformation out there about dreaming in particular and what it is and what it means and so I figured…it’s about time that Tiny Matters covered it.ĭeboki: Today on the show, in addition to hearing about spider sleep and possible spider dreaming, we’ll talk about why scientists think we dream and some of the big questions they’re trying to answer. At the beginning of last month-August 2022-our listener Prabarna (thanks Prabarna!) pointed me to a story in The New York Times titled, “Do spiders dream of eight-legged sheep?” Great title. I’m Sam Jones and I am joined by my co-host Deboki Chakravarti. So when I came across a study showing that humans and spiders might not be as different as you’d think when it comes to sleep and maybe dreaming, I had to learn more about it. Sam: Yeah I think sleep and dreaming are so interesting.
And I knew it was a dream while I was dreaming it, but I was still so happy to hold my cat in the dream. What about you Deboki?ĭeboki Chakravarti: I usually don’t remember much about what I dream, but I’m traveling right now and had to leave my cat with my parents, it’s a whole thing, since I’m going to be out of the US for a few months, and last week I had a super vivid dream that my parents came to visit me with my cat. Not in the ‘I have big dreams’ sense-although I would like to think I do-but in the ‘I go to sleep and my brain is cooking up dreams.’ A lot of the time I think I just remember little pieces of them, or wake up knowing that I had a dream but have already forgotten what happened in it. Sam Jones: I don’t know about you, but I am someone who dreams a lot.
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