[Gentle music]
Isn’t that beautiful?
It’s amazing.
I was doing some kind of preliminary study for researching spider behaviour on water,
and they didn’t they didn’t do much actually.
And they are walking some time but didn't do anything.
But if, when I started to blow them, they started to raise their legs. Then I repeated
that again and again, and every time I blew them they raised their legs.
So every time you blew them they lifted their legs?
Yes.
So it was sailing. I called Sara and we started to observe. I did many experiments, using
a more than 1,000 spiders. Spiders are really important for all sorts
of reasons, and one of them is control of pests in farmers’ fields. So we really want
to know more about where they go, what they eat, how they move, how they get to a farmer’s
field, for our own benefit really. But on top of that they’re endlessly fascinating
creatures, and I think this really shows just how little we know about them. And quite often
spiders get, not the best write-up in the Press. But there’s actually so many wonderful
things about them, and so many good things they do, that that’s really one of the reasons
why I study them.
So this one, is he lifting his back or his….? So he’s lifting his back leg.
Yes, only one back leg. Doing like a backwards Arabesque.
Mmm.
One of things I’ve been particularly interested to study is spiders ballooning. So using their
silk as a sail to fly through the air. And one of the really fascinating things about
this study, really, is that it shows that when they land somewhere that’s not really
ideal for them, they may have strategies to cope with that, so that they can then move
on. And the fact that they are so extremely good at moving from one place to another means
that quite often they are the first things that arrive on places like volcanic islands
in the ocean. One of the first things people may see is a spider flying by. And in fact
if you go to the Arctic, in some places where spiders couldn’t really survive and live,
in fact flying spiders are actually flying vitamin pills for some of the birds that live
up there, because they actually eat the spiders that come flying past. So they’re incredibly
important, and yet they’re very hard to track, because they’re so small as you see.
Really fiddly to work with, and there’s a lot more that we don’t understand about
them, that really perhaps it’s time we did.
[Gentle music]
Hence really why we have a spider lab. And one of the things that we’re really interested
in, on the theme of water, is spiders that actually have taken the real plunge and live
right underneath the water. And that’s a separate piece of work we’ve got going on
at the minute. And really trying to understand more about how they do that, why they do that.
It’s the focus of lots of our projects at the minute.
[Gentle music]