Amidst terrible fomo seeing all the cool conferences, I’ve been dying to share the news of our latest discovery 🥳 You thought jumping spiders peaked in their coolness? Buckle up!!! We need to talk about #jumpingspiders potentially #dreaming. @PNASNews
A thread with #videos 1/7
A thread with #videos 1/7
While filming hanging jumping spiders at night, we noticed surprising things happening. Regular phases of curling up their legs and twitching in what seemed like uncontrolled movements. Reminding us a lot of sleeping dogs or cats, we asked: could this be REM sleep? 2/7
Too wild you think? So did we. We followed up anyhow. Luckily, fresh spiderlings are translucent during the first week, giving us the unique opportunity to check out their retinas (they can’t move their “eyes”, but their retinas, which is extra cool). 3/7
And indeed, we found the same phases of twitching and leg curling AND every time that happened, the retinas were moving!!!😮 4/7
Octopuses have REM-like sleep. Do spiders too? We need to have a closer look at how universal REM sleep and REM-like behaviors might be across the animal kingdom. There are likely many things we can learn from this, since even in humans REM sleep is still a big mystery. 5/7
Does this mean spiders dream? We do not know. But the possibility is exhilarating. I want to thank a dream team of researchers for starting this wild journey with me. And also three great reviewers! I can’t wait to continue my research on this for the next couple of years.
6/7
6/7
Follow this link for the publication and watch out for retweets of amazing write-ups about the story. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2… 7/7
Want to thank a lot of folks!!! @pupating @MegCrofoot @dineshraov @camillowitsch @Frau_Lehrerin13 @MarieHerberstei
And of course @JoanStrassmann for handling the paper!! 🕷
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