During the height of COVID pandemic lockdown, researcher Daniela Roessler took on a peculiar new hobby: observing the sleeping patterns of spiders to try and figure out if they dream.
The twitches came in very regular intervals of about 20 to 30 minutes. That's when we said, okay, let's have a look at baby spiders because they're transparent and we could actually see the retinal tube. When we saw that all those twitching always occurred with movements of the retinas, that's when we were like, okay, well yeah, this could really be REM sleep.
[…]
We see the leg curling behavior in orb web spiders. So we went out in the field and tested whether there are times where they are less responsive. So we went with a sound stimulus that is actually the wing beat frequency of wasps and bees. So the nice thing about this stimulus with common orb web spider Arenus diadimatus is that it will robustly display an anti-predator signal and what we see is that during the night when they're immobile, they need much higher stimulus to wake up and react at the same time.
Scientific American
The research is still ongoing, and there's obviously much more to it.
Roessler also published a paper with her research back in 2022, alongside Kris Kim, Massimo De Agrò, and Paul S. Shamble, if you really want to dive into the web of spider REM.
Previously:
• Trapdoor Ravine Spider's butt easily mistaken for Oreo cookie
