Plan B Forum

ex-khobar Andy wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 11, 2020 12:39 pm

This was actually a serious story in New Scientist years ago. (1995 - I just looked it up. My memory told me it was earlier which is unusual for me - these days I am far more likely to say something happened 20 years ago and find it was actually much earlier than that.)

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg ... irrelevant

A spoof Hinterland Who's Who episode entitled "The Wood Spider" credited to "First Church of Christ, Filmmaker" was released on YouTube in 2006 and has garnered over 33 million views as of May 2013. The video purported to show the behavior of wood spiders given various drugs, such as alcohol, caffeine, and THC, a mocking reference to the 1940s research of Dr. Peter N. Witt, who showed that giving drugs to spiders alters their web building behavior.[12]

Spiders
In 1948, Swiss pharmacologist Peter N. Witt started his research on the effect of drugs on spiders. The initial motivation for the study was a request from his colleague, zoologist H. M. Peters, to shift the time when garden spiders build their webs from 2am–5am, which apparently annoyed Peters, to earlier hours.[4] Witt tested spiders with a range of psychoactive drugs, including amphetamine, mescaline, strychnine, LSD, and caffeine, and found that the drugs affect the size and shape of the web rather than the time when it is built. At small doses of caffeine (10 µg/spider), the webs were smaller; the radii were uneven, but the regularity of the circles was unaffected. At higher doses (100 µg/spider), the shape changed more, and the web design became irregular. All the drugs tested reduced web regularity except for small doses (0.1–0.3 µg) of LSD, which increased web regularity.[2]

The drugs were administered by dissolving them in sugar water, and a drop of solution was touched to the spider's mouth. In some later studies, spiders were fed with drugged flies.[5] For qualitative studies, a well-defined volume of solution was administered through a fine syringe. The webs were photographed for the same spider before and after drugging.[2]

Witt's research was discontinued, but it became reinvigorated in 1984 after a paper by J.A. Nathanson in the journal Science,[6] which is discussed below. In 1995, a NASA research group repeated Witt's experiments on the effect of caffeine, benzedrine, marijuana and chloral hydrate on European garden spiders. NASA's results were qualitatively similar to those of Witt, but the novelty was that the pattern of the spider web was quantitatively analyzed with modern statistical tools, and proposed as a sensitive method of drug detection.[1][7]