Number 16 (spider)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_16_(spider)

by histories • 2 years ago

327 125 2 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

egypturnash2• 2 years ago

Forty-three years. That’s a long time to be a spider.

throwanem4• 2 years ago

It's a long time to be a human, come to that.

Bonolio• 2 years ago

One has to consider that if the longest lived spider ever, is one out of possible millions, chosen for a particular study, that maybe 43 years isn't actually that long for a spider. It seems unlikely that at random they just happened to choose the spider that would live longer than them all.

sdenton4• 2 years ago

Black widow spiders last something like a thousand eggs, and the hatchlings murder and easy one another until only a couple survive... Who go in to live for as long as black widows live for. The average lifespan is likely quite low, however.

thaumasiotes4• 2 years ago

Very few people seem to be able to distinguish between "the largest number on record" and "the largest thing that ever happened", even if they know perfectly well that records of whatever the phenomenon is are never kept.

epolanski2• 2 years ago

Can't they make different studies to determine age?

We know that some turtles, sharks and whales can live way more than a century if not multiple centuries, but we don't know that because we have been following them from centuries.

There's a tortoise living on the Seychelle's governor garden since 1882 and has outlived every single governor yet.

We have a picture of it dating 1886: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Jonathan...

egypturnash2• 2 years ago

Imagine the life of a spider. Imagine it for forty three years. Lurking in your burrow, waiting for a snack to wander by. Getting fucked by spider boys and maybe eating them. Do trapdoor spiders eat their mates? I’m not sure. Laying eggs and watching the spiderlings go running off. Again and again for forty three years.

That just feels like a long time to be a spider.

ErneX• 2 years ago

And it was killed, who knows for how long it could have lived.

pvaldes2• 2 years ago

In my opinion, the logical assumption is that this spider species can't live for much more time than exactly that interval of time

The interesting point here to me is that it was not killed before. This suggests that it was able to fend off the wasps attacks for fourty years. I assume that hen died it was too weak (too old) to fight back. Another possibility is that it had moult recently and was too soft to defend itself.

Insects die soon because adult wings can't moult twice. Spiders don't have wings so they can moult indefinitely and became much much older than insects --but-- is easy to predict that (unlike jellyfishes), spiders can't live forever

We can be 100% sure of this empirically. We even could predict mathematically the life time span of each species, also if we would want it (again, in my opinion).

serf• 2 years ago

it's neat that the spider outlasted the arachnologist's career.

I wonder how long it would have lived without the wasps' interference.

bentcorner• 2 years ago

While we're talking spiders, here's a book recommendation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel) (it's a fantastic novel, if you have any interest at all don't spoil it for yourself)

riffraff• 2 years ago

I second this, I cannot recommend this enough. The sequels are also interesting, but not so much.

throwanem4• 2 years ago

Strong second.

jasonkester• 2 years ago

Yeah, it’s got a bit of that “sci-fi books that HN recommends “ syndrome in that it’s a cool idea for a book but not actually a good book. More interesting to have described to you by someone who has read it than to read.

But probably worth forcing your way through the poor writing, character building and storytelling to get those cool ideas out of it.

It’s a good book to have read, but not to read, I guess. Sadly, the second one squanders an even more interesting concept, and isn’t worth reading.

hakfoo• 2 years ago

I found the pacing a bit difficult, like they got 500 pages in and realized "okay, we've gotta wrap this up in a hurry".

thaumasiotes4• 2 years ago

it’s a cool idea for a book but not actually a good book

This was my impression of K. J. Parker's work. (I read the Scavenger trilogy of his.)

Intricate idea, uninteresting writing.

shirleyquirk• 2 years ago

I’m so glad to hear you say that, i was carrying it around while slogging through it and everyone else who saw exclaimed how good they’d heard it was. I do think the sequel is better, I can suspend my disbelief more and found parts of it honestly thrilling

hluska• 2 years ago

That’s a whole lot of words to shit on a book that someone else wrote. It’s not a very good look. I mean, yes you’re smart, but have some class.

kmarc• 2 years ago

I read it before I became a daily reader of HN.

I always thought and still think it's a great book. It may miss some writer's instruments to make it "a good book" in the classical sense, but to me it wasn't missing at all.

If anyone here neglects this book due to being a "sci-fi booksthat HN recommends", please give it a try!

autoexec• 2 years ago

Yeah, it’s got a bit of that “sci-fi books that HN recommends “ syndrome in that it’s a cool idea for a book but not actually a good book.

Since you seem to have a higher bar than many, what are some examples of sci-fi books that you think are actually good books?

ilamparithi• 2 years ago

Didn't work for me as well. Mainly pacing and writing style. Didn't finish the book.

hultner2• 2 years ago

I have not read this but I can recommend Vernor Vinges book “A Deepness of the Sky” on a similar theme. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky

TheMagicHorsey• 2 years ago

I've read both and both are 10/10. But if you use a 100-point scale then Vinge's book is 99/100 and Tchaikovsky's is 95/100.

foobiekr• 2 years ago

The final sentence is very sad. Fuck Alzheimer’s.

epolanski2• 2 years ago

A neighbor of mine went from the most brilliant and kindest person I've ever met, to not recognizing his own wife at home in a short time span of few months.

The fact that he would not recognize me after talking together every week for a decade felt slightly odd.

But what broke the camel's straw was after one morning he assaulted his own wife coming back with groceries thinking she was an intruder.

Living 50 years together and not remembering her at all was awful.

Broke her and his heart too when he had to be taken to a proper elderly care facility as he was too dangerous (70+ but still very fit and strong) to his own family. Obviously, luck wanted that he was lucid when they were taking him out the house. He was aware of what was happening and why for few minutes. But when it came to say goodbye it felt like Shutter Island finale, you couldn't say whether he was now faking a few moments later or if he was doing it because aware of his condition and danger.

rc_mob• 2 years ago

the spider is forever alive in her heart

happytoexplain2• 2 years ago

For her 40th birthday, research assistant Leanda Mason wanted to give the spider a mealworm, but Main denied the request since it would interfere with the study.

I have to admire the level of professionalism it takes to not give a single mealworm to a spider you have been watching for forty years.

EugeneOZ• 2 years ago

They also didn't give her a name - she remained “#16”, without any pet name.

throwanem4• 2 years ago

Nor should they have. Instead, they behaved respectfully.

lIl-IIIl• 2 years ago

Reminds me of "Red XIII", a character in Final Fantasy 7, who was a specimen in a study when encountered by the player. The name is probably chosen to highlight the heartless practice of giving a number to a sentient being instead of using a name.

thaumasiotes4• 2 years ago

On the other hand, the difference it makes in the study is zero.

alex_duf• 2 years ago

what if the spider dies shortly after? You'll have no way of knowing if the worm was the cause of the death.

what if the spider doesn't die shortly after? You'll have no way of knowing if the spider would have died of hunger without your intervention

happytoexplain2• 2 years ago

In my opinion, your confidence is unwarranted.

janalsncm• 2 years ago

What amazes me about spiders is their complex unlearned behavior. No trapdoor spider learns how to build a trap. No orb weaver learns how to spin a web. Trap/web building behavior is entirely programmed in their DNA.

I think about this a lot in the context of conversations about intelligence. If spiders can have complex behaviors hard-coded, humans certainly do too. (In other words, the Tabula Rasa theory is wrong.) The ability to learn language and emotion are certainly two examples. We are pretty good at certain things (learning language, picking up social cues) and relatively bad at others (calculating an 18% tip).

So if you’re going to measure “intelligence” the first thing you’ll need to do is choose what to measure. What questions do you ask? You might be inclined to pick things we humans think are important. But then that’s not an objective universal measurement, at best it’s yardstick for human cognitive abilities.

ggm2• 2 years ago

They don't just build one. You may mean they don't learn from observation of others or from their mother. They may still acquire a sense of a better trapdoor and make better trap doors by experience. I can't think of an experiment to test the theory, but it might be around qualities like "thickness" or "wind resistance" if you could make a condition of test which put the trapdoor they do un-biassed under specific stresses.

4gotunameagain2• 2 years ago

Still, even if that's true, it does not refute the point. The knowledge necessary to build the very first burrow or web, or trapdoor (which will be definitely more than good enough otherwise spiders would no longer exist) is hardcoded, not externally acquired.

FabHK• 2 years ago

the Tabula Rasa theory is wrong

Good book about precisely this (and in agreement with your statement) is cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker's 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate

dhosek2• 2 years ago

I’ve thought about differing levels of innate behaviors in different species as being somewhat akin to different sorts of programming languages. So dogs and cats are more akin to, say, Pascal¹ which provides a high level of functionality at the language level, but are limited in capability² while humans are more like C where there’s less functionality out of the box, but the ability to accomplish unique tasks is less bounded.

⸻

1. This is a theory I came up with as a high school student in the 80s so my choices of programming languages reflect that.

2. Insert obligatory Turing-completeness disclaimer here.

aa-jv5• 2 years ago

Story time.

I'm from Western Australia and spent a lot of time in its deserts in my youth.

I have a very distinct memory of walking out among the spinifex as a child, needing to pee. Its hot, my bare feet are burning, the ground is unforgiving and I already have spinifex'ed ankles, so naturally I tread as carefully as I can, trying to avoid the sand and the spikes, only walking on the slightly less heated organic mats that surround some of the spinifex, a kind of carpet of twigs and leaves, gathered in pockets by the wind.

The natural urge is rising, and I stop paying attention and get a bit of pace, as relief must be had. I see a particularly appealing area, covered by this organic dust, and I leap over to it, get my body parts aligned, and begin the process of relief.

A few seconds into it, I feel something moving. The entire mat that I was standing on, is in fact, a field of trap doors. Maybe a hundred of them. They begin to open.

I have never levitated as hard and as fast in my life.

So my Tabula Rasa has given me this lesson: don't go into the spinifex to pee. Ever.

tgittos• 2 years ago

Wild. I also grew up in Perth and until just now thought WA didn't have trapdoor spiders. Thanks for the anecdote that taught me something.

bruce511• 2 years ago

We struggle to define intelligence, much less measure it.

When I was at school a million years ago "smart" kids were ones who learned to read fast, did numbers well, and had good memory recall.

Then along came computers, which had perfect memory, did numbers really well. So "intelligent machines?"

Obviously not, so we tweaked our measure of intelligence. Perhaps to include writing well, or learning quickly. Which, um, computers now do.

But we still view the computers as "not intelligent" but I'm not sure what measure we'll use now. Something to do with art or music? Hmm, no, wait, that's no good either....

(PS schools still mostly measure numbers and memory....)

lukan3• 2 years ago

"But we still view the computers as "not intelligent" but I'm not sure what measure we'll use now. Something to do with art or music? Hmm, no, wait, that's no good either...."

We could focus on whether the student has actually understood the topic and is not just able to produce nice sounding words and some quotes about it.

dotancohen2• 2 years ago

Schools deem a child smart when that child excels at tasks that the school assigns to them. I've those tasks were simply to read and add. Then those tasks included writing and remembering. What tasks do schools demand of children today?

It seems that intelligence is a term that we apply to people who consistently excel at the mental tasks assigned to them, no matter what those tasks entail.

LtdJorge2• 2 years ago

Kids being smart normally means they are _more_ intelligent than the others. Computers, compared to average humans are dumb as rocks.

fmbb• 2 years ago

Who struggles to do what for which purpose?

Sometimes the word “intelligent” is used by someone who sells IQ tests.

Sometimes the word is used by someone who sells the idea of a computer that can think like a human.

I don’t know if people in general struggle or care about the definition.

liampulles• 2 years ago

I wonder if the process of building a complex web can be reduced to a simple set of rules, almost like a cellular automata.

The simple rulesets which lead to complex outcomes in nature is amazing to me.

fartsucker692• 2 years ago

simple nets for sure, but spiders can easily deal with an uncountable number of corner cases, I somehow think it's not reducible to all-too simple rules (in the 'game of life' sense) and more an interaction of several non-trivially complex systems like their various perception systems.

obviously their neural networks are limited in size and therefor complexity has to remain somewhat simple relatively to larger animals).

tshaddox• 2 years ago

Many years ago when I was working IT for a public school district, I was unpacking a large number of identical HP PCs from cardboard boxes. I noticed that a large portion (it must have been half or more) of the boxes had the exact same type of spider in a nearly identical web in the exact same spot in the cardboard box. It was a small cardboard cubby taped onto the inside of the large exterior box, for storing a power cord and other small accessories. It must have been just the right shape and size, and accessible in just the right way, that this type of spider absolutely loved it.

viraptor2• 2 years ago

If spiders can have complex behaviors hard-coded, humans certainly do too.

Depends what you mean by complex... All creatures get born with an idea how to get food. Human babies have never seen breast or anyone sucking breast, yet they can go through the process pretty much immediately. That's a very clever movement / sensation following combination, but it's there from the beginning.

alandarev• 2 years ago

do you have children or worked with babies? they suck anything they can fit in mouth. The reflex of sucking is wired, yes, but not the object

philipwhiuk• 2 years ago

What amazes me about spiders is their complex unlearned behavior. No trapdoor spider learns how to build a trap. No orb weaver learns how to spin a web. Trap/web building behavior is entirely programmed in their DNA.

Do we really have evidence for this rather than observation and communication from parents to offspring. I'm deeply skeptical.

edanm• 2 years ago

I have no idea about this, but, how hard would it be in theory to test? Just remove a spider from any other spiders and see if they develop that behavior.

I don't know if the parent comment represented the expert consensus correctly, but if they did, I wouldn't automatically be skeptical of it.

berkes• 2 years ago

we do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture#Intellig...

That evidence is compelling and well-reviewed. But that evidence is also countered with other evidence: the debate isn't settled. But it's undoubtedly clear that a part of our intelligence and other personality traits are inherited: coded into our DNA. What's not settled, is how much.

seszett2• 2 years ago

Spiders that hatch without their parents around build the same webs as any other spider from the same species. This behaviour is really not something that leaves any space for being sceptical.

indigoabstract• 2 years ago

Is it too much to believe that both hardware (built-in) and software (flexible) parts are employed in nature?

otabdeveloper4• 2 years ago

If spiders can have complex behaviors hard-coded, humans certainly do too.

That does not follow. It's a logical fallacy. ('Spiders can have eight legs, so humans certainly do too.')

hypertele-Xii2• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymelia

fartsucker692• 2 years ago

in the limit the distinction between something that is learned and something that is programmed genetically is somewhat a matter of definitions. if a species genes makes it so they create a complex social web that teaches all its individuals certain skills, is that genetically programmed or not?

free will wouldn't even change that, since it's presumably also given by our genes.

dcre• 2 years ago

It's only a logical fallacy if it is taken to be the entirety of the argument rather than an abbreviated representation of a longer chain of reasoning. I don't think anyone would claim that sentence is self-evidently true!

utensil4778• 2 years ago

Try this one: we observe complex instinctual behaviors in most animals on this planet. Therefore it follows that humans are special and have no complex instinctual behaviors.

barbs• 2 years ago

Sometimes I feel like my fear of spiders is baked into my DNA. I think I found some evidence to support this, can't remember where though...

llmblockchain• 2 years ago

Interesting-- I wonder if criminal behavior is embedded in DNA...

Geezus_42• 2 years ago

And now we're heading towards eugenics once again. Amazing how quickly these discussions turn that direction.

angiosperm• 2 years ago

Curiously, though, we don't really know it is coded in DNA.

Michael Levin has been discovering lately that biology is more complicated than we thought. His YT videos are mind-boggling. Flatworm genetics are a dog's breakfast that the cells work around by means nobody understands.

moi2388• 2 years ago

His talks are some of the most fascinating I’ve ever heard. Nick Lane is a close second.

phito• 2 years ago

Michael Levin's work is awesome

fngjdflmdflg2• 2 years ago

What do you mean by this specifically? What claims does he make? It's hard to respond to this just based on what you wrote. I don't think biologists have claimed that biology isn't complicated, and I don't think anyone claims that DNA isn't complicated either. Unless you are referring to genetics? That is still caused by DNA, just not by gene expression.

AeroNotix• 2 years ago

I think the biggest issues involved around knowledge/skills/intelligence being potentially linked to genetics is that it often draws the eugenics proponents into the discussion and it's obvious how that conversation ends.

SCM-Enthusiast• 2 years ago

the children of time series explores this concept in spiders. What happens if you were able pass down all of your knowledge into your children through genetics and how would that change society.

jcul• 2 years ago

It reminds me of how Noam Chomsky speaks about language / language learning being something inate in humans.

diroussel• 2 years ago

Carl Jung held this view too. And he knew his teacher Freud disagreed. For instance a Carl Jung thought a humans fear of spiders in innate, and not learnt.

The same as how a bird can be scared on snakes. Interestingly native birds in Australia aren’t scared of humans.

csomar• 2 years ago

For instance a Carl Jung thought a humans fear of spiders in innate, and not learnt.

I don't have fear of spiders (was surprised by how many people do fear spiders). When I was young, I "hosted" a bunch of them under my table. Thinking of it, I think most people have their fears transmitted through their mothers. My mom certainly didn't fear spiders but she hated their "dirty" webs.

For example I do have a strong reaction to cockroaches till this day; a harmless insect that my mother fear. I can't even look at the beast. My cousin do not and conversely do fear spiders.

magicalhippo2• 2 years ago

I saw a project on GitHub some time ago where someone trained a neural net with only a single, shared weight to play a driving game.

They used a gentic algorithm to evolve the network, its connections and activation functions (per node).

It got quite good.

Perhaps not that surprising that one can encode a lot in the graph structure itself, and given how DNA is quite good at dictating complex organs, I don't see why something similar couldn't be at work for insects and mammals alike. After all, nobody taught the newborn kangaroo babies how to crawl up into the pouch of their mom either.

mobeets• 2 years ago

Probably this (awesome) paper: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2019/hash/e98741479a7b9...

SideburnsOfDoom• 2 years ago

It has been well argued that "The Blank Slate" argument is wrong, or at least more complex and subtle than that.

In Pinker's book The Blank Slate" in particular.

We are born blank of our mother tongue, but are wired to acquire one. Not wired with the skill itself, but with the propensity to acquire it. Both nature and nurture are deeply important to the outcome.

dhosek2• 2 years ago

I kind of wonder whether certain cultural artifacts might be genetically inspired. My son, when he was young, without any prompting wanted to be an architect (like his great-grandfather whom he had never met, nor even heard anything about before this) and was obsessed with guitars (like me, although at that point, my own guitar had been in the basement for years and he had never seen me play it). This is not to say that these particular behaviors are explicitly encoded in genetics (both guitars and architecture as a discipline are much younger than evolutionary time), but rather that some intrinsic predisposition towards them exists (so, perhaps had we lived in fifteenth-century Persia, we would be oud-obsessed, to choose one posseible alternate reality).

dewbrite• 2 years ago

Anecdotally, I had a grandfather I never met who had built his own house on a nice plot of land out in the sticks, and that's something I'm obsessed with doing in the future. My father also worked in tech, but didn't really pass knowledge to me.

Though, both of these things are almost stereotypical [1]

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/vnmmuo/whe...

philipswood• 2 years ago

I'd hazard:

- fascination with fire, - love of tools, - teenage interest in weapons.

foolfoolz• 2 years ago

i think we are going to find way more comes from dna than we thought. Physiognomy is the science of determining your personality (and other traits) from the way your face looks. this was cast aside as pseudoscience like palm reading, until recently ai facial recognition found its real

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognomy

jonahx• 2 years ago

Because of Number 16, Main's project took far longer than she had expected. She continued to work into her late 80s, but she "began to look forward to the project's end"

Reminded me of The Onion's "Expert Wasted Entire Life Studying Anteaters":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXD9HnrNrvk

junon• 2 years ago

Australian arachnologist Barbara York Main ... returned to the site annually, sometimes more frequently, for more than four decades.

Huge respect. Always amazed by scientists sticking with studies like that.

brap• 2 years ago

I wonder what it’s like living life idle 99% of the time. Do spiders get bored?

optimalsolver• 2 years ago

You may be interested in this discussion:

"Imagining the psychology of aliens evolved from ambush predators"

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16a9m2h/ima...

disagree123• 2 years ago

Rarely do I see a wikipedia post here that actually is new and interesting to me. Thanks!

zeigotaro• 2 years ago

This was also posted on depthsofwikipedia on IG, which, if you haven't checked out, is quite the rabbit hole. Highly recommended.

Miraltar• 2 years ago

The longest-lived spider: mygalomorphs dig deep, and persevere

Research article reporting the spider's death by Leanda Denise Mason, Grant Wardell-Johnson and Barbara York Main

https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%...

Number 16 (spider)

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