Unlike cockroaches that need to be fitted with robotic parts before they can dance, male wolf spiders are naturally gifted with Fred Astaire-like tappy feet. In fact, they use this ability to woo potential mates. But perhaps more impressive is the fact that they're cunning enough to spy on their rivals' courtship rituals — and even steal some of their slickest dance moves. This behavior called "eavesdropping" was recently discovered in spiders by a team of biologists from the University of Cincinnati.
The researchers played a video of an eight-legged dancing king during a courtship ceremony in the presence of the test spiders. While naïve lab-grown specimens that have never seen mating rituals before couldn't care less about what's on the screen, the spiders captured from the wild mimicked the moves of the virtual arachnids. Some of them (like the spider on the video above) even adjusted the rates of their leg tapping movements so they could outperform their perceived rival.
For the males of a species, eavesdropping means observing other males so they "can learn about the strengths of potential opponents." For females, it means copying the mate choices of others. Prior to this finding, eavesdropping has only been observed in more complex vertebrate animals like birds, fish, and humans.
George W. Uetz, one of the biologists in the study, says this new discovery suggests that spiders may be capable of more sophisticated behaviors. "The closer we look at spiders, the more complex we see they are — their capacity for learning, memory and decision-making is far greater than we ever would have thought."