Number Five
Drugged Spiders
In 1995, a few unfortunate spiders were given various common drugs out of their will.
Now they are slaves to the drugs given by the bad bad humans.
Well, not really.
But it is true that in 1995, NASA scientists have conducted a study to see what various
drugs do to spiders and their ability to spin their webs.
They continued the experiments done by J.A Nathanson in 1984 who continued another experiment
by Swiss pharmacologist Peter N. Witt from 1948.
They administered the drugs by either dropping the drug solution on the spider's mouth or
by feeding them drugged flies or even by using a fine syringe.
In 1948, H.M Peters, a zoologist was studying spiders and their web-building techniques
but to his annoyance, spiders usually build their webs around 2 to 5 in the morning.
This was a problem because he needed to film their web building but he often fell asleep.
So he enlisted help from Peter N. Witt which suggested using drugs in hopes for the spiders
to change their web building schedule.
Surprisingly to them, rather than the spiders changing the time they spin their webs, they
instead change the patterns of their webs.
Here are some examples of what their webs look like.
Lets start of with no drugs, you could see how beautiful and detailed the web is.
On Caffeine, at 10µg it became uneven, disorganised and smaller than usual.
At 100µg, the ability of web weaving went down the toilet altogether.
On Marijuana, it seemed like they tried to make a proper web, but gave up halfway or
loses concentration.
And on LSD, they surprisingly become more detailed and orderly.
There are more different drugs tested on spiders.
These are just to name a few.
Now, a reason as to why spiders were then continued to be used for drug testing in later
experiments is because spiders are cheap, produce relatively fast outcomes and gives
a good visualisation of the effects of drugs.
Another reason is that sadly, spiders aren't protected by the law and isn't considered
under animal cruelty because not many people care about spiders.
Number Four
Eliciting Sexual Behaviour in Turkeys
This experiment was made out of curiosity and nothing much.
It was to determine the minimal stimulus it needed to excite a turkey by Martin Schein
and Edgare Hale of the University of Pennsylvania.
The male turkeys apparently are not fussy at all.
Give them a lifelike model, and they'll be happy with them.
This is when the researchers removed bit by bit parts from the turkey model until they lost interest.
Tail, feet, wings gone.
But still the male bird remains unfazed.
Finally the researchers left just the head of a female turkey on a stick and STILL they
showed interest to mate, real severed head or model doesn't really matter.
Surprisingly, they prefer a pretty face rather than a pretty body, as a headless body is
less desirable.
This is probably because of the way turkeys mate.
They would usualy enshroud the females body and only leave the females neck and up in
its line of sight during the act of copulation.
Thus the excitement even from just a head on a stick.
Apparently they did the same experiment with chickens and well, them roosters prefered
the body rather than the heads.
Number Three
Electric Shocks and Puppies
An American psychologist by the name of Martin Seligman is pretty famous for his various
experiments that involves electric shocks on humans or puppies.
He had the Obedience Experiment in 1963, where he gets an actor connected to wires and on
the other end a person controlling how far they would go in shocking a living being on
the basis of being instructed.
His experiment proved that people will be able to kill if instructed as the responsibility
is technically not on them.
Though because critics said that the subjects might have noticed the actors acting and that
it was all a ruse, he changed the experiment by changing the actors with puppies and instead
of fake electric shocks into real ones.
Lets just say his experiment and conclusion was a success as twenty out of twenty six
subjects pushed the shock button to the maximum voltage.
Another experiment also by Seligman was the Learned Helplessness experiment done in 1965.
Learned helplessness is when you feel like you can't control a bad situation and end
up just giving up and accepting your fate.
He wanted to expand an old experiment by Pavlov that made dogs salivate with the sound of
the bell.
But his experiment involved a bell and electric shocks instead of food.
He strapped the dogs with a harness and everytime he rang the bell, an electric shock was given.
After conditioning the dog, he puts each dog into a bigger box which was divided in the
centre with a small fence where one side would shock the dogs while the other would be safe.
So putting the dog inside, they rang the bell, but the dogs only cowered and braced itself
even after a real shock was done.
While when dogs that was never conditioned got zapped, it would jump the fence to escape.
Thus, learned helplessness is a psychological problem even humans have.
Number Two
The Two Headed Dog
This is the famous now unethical experiment done by a Soviet scientist named Vladimir
Demikhov in the 1950s.
This experiment involved two dogs and making them into one.
Well a dog with two heads to be precise.
Demikhov grafted the head, shoulders and front legs of a puppy onto the neck of an adult dog.
He connected the blood vessels in a way that the adult dog's heart would be enough to pump
blood for both the dogs.
But they left the esophageal tube of the puppy unconnected to anything except the outside.
The surgery was quite a success.
Both dogs were alive after the surgery.
The puppy yawned when it woke up and the big dog was confused and tried to shake it off.
Both dogs maintained their own personality where the puppy were feisty and playful while
the older dog just seemed unamused.
It interesting how when the big dog got thirsty, the puppy would also get thirsty even without
its esophageal tube connected to the rest of its alimentary tract.
So the milk they fed the dogs could be seen dribbling from it.
Over the course of fifteen years, Demikhov made a total of twenty of the two headed dogs.
None of them lived long because of tissue rejection but the longest ever recorded was
just a month and the first ever two headed dog only survived for six days.
But because of this surgical experiment.
It expanded the surgical techniques and medicine of the possibility of transplanting between humans.
Such as the heart and lung transplants.
Number One
Mother?
Would you choose a fluffy blanket that does nothing or a cold steel fence that feeds you?
This is technically what was done on infant rhesus monkeys as a psychological experiment.
Dr. Harry Harlow, a psychologist, was quite an unsympathetic person and is famous for
his Monkey Love psychological experiments.
He subjected a lot of experiments on different monkeys which were all seperated from their
biological mothers from birth.
The most famous experiment is the one where the monkeys were given two inanimate surrogate
mothers.
One was made from bare-wires and the other was covered in cloth.
He presented the infants with the surrogates under different conditions.
Condition one had the wire mother holding a bottle of food and the cloth mother remains
stationary doing nothing and condition two had the cloth mother holding the bottle while
the wire mother does nothing.
Either condition showed an overwhelming result where the infant macaques prefered to cling
on the cloth mother no matter if it provided food or not.
When subjected to fear, if the surrogate mother is not present, the macaques would be so afraid,
they would be paralyzed, avoids the source of their fear, huddle into a ball and start
sucking their thumbs.
But if a surrogate mother is present, the macaques shows less fear and would show more
courage to explore and even attack the source of its fear.
Dr Harlow did a lot of experiments with different conditions on the infant macaques.
There's another one that's pretty sad for the macaques.
It involved the macaques to be isolated in darkness for up to one year.
Either from birth or repetitively from their peers.
They found out, having less social contact gets the monkeys to be severely psychologically
disturbed and depressed.
His aim with the experiments were to prove that the psychology between an infants love
and needs and the feeling of attachment and loss.
Of course he used monkeys, but he used it as a base that humans would act the same way
in terms of separating children from their mothers and proves how "contact comfort" is
important for the psychological development and health of infant monkeys and children.
Also yes it was highly controversial and now definitely deemed unethical.