Talk:Spider behavior

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Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need. Spiders To do: Our more experienced editors are working on the project infrastructure, classifying articles, and listing/assessing red links. You can join the project, or just check out what can be done. Your assistance is welcome! Clean up the article Spiders. (find "storyline", equal level of depth of information) Check out if pages are named correctly, eg.: several family pages seem to have names that only apply to a subset of the family. --Sarefo 02:47, 31 July 2006 (UTC) Move pictures from en:Wikipedia to WikiCommons, using this nice tool. Translate pages from other WPs into English Expand the following articles (and many, many more): Arachnology Determine spider pictures (many more at Commons) find example species for every spider family check the Spider gallery, upload pictures to the commons if necessary. create distribution maps much, much more, check the Project page, or leave a note at Sarefo's talk page If you complete one of these tasks, please remove it from the list and add your achievement to the project log.

This area seems to have fallen out of favor with researchers who publish. John Crompton's book, The Life of the Spiders got me interested from the minute I started reading it because it was written by a knowledgeable person about the creatures he had come to feel a great appreciation for. He was a British civil servant in the Far East who frequently had nothing better to do than watch the spiders on the wall of whatever official "guest house" he had lodged in while he was conducting official business for a day or two. He checked his information with scientists back in Great Britain, but he did not hold back from describing what he had seen, nor did he refrain from retelling stories he had learned about Fabre and other early scientific investigators. How many neurons constitute a normal spider brain? To me it is very interesting to see how some things some spiders do seem to involve intentions and even planning. One account of a Grammostola rosea that I read somewhere years ago said that one was put in a terrerium of some kind that had a bed of colored aquarium "stones" (glass beads, I suspect). The spider moved the stones around so that they were segregated by color. The chances of that kind of an arrangement occuring by chance is probably a little better than the chance that a gazillion monkeys could type out the sonnets of Shakespeare just by randomly pecking at keyboards. -- P0M

[edit] sections

• links to articles with interesting spider behavior (jumping spiders for example)
• general modes of behavior:
  • web building
  • "intelligence" in spiders
  • hunting behavior

maybe categorize "behavioral types" of spiders. --Sarefo 15:51, 22 July 2006 (UTC)