Leg hair

I came across an entertaining bit of science this morning in a break from the mostly dreary & depressing stuff to be found in the Guardian.

It seems that there is a whole team of people working away on the hearing of a sort of spider which has no ears, the jumping spider. They have discovered that this spider is not deaf after all, managing a bit of hearing through the hairs on its legs and they are particularly sensitive to sounds of around 90Hz, which, as it happens, is the wing beat of the sort of wasp which eats this particular sort of spider.

With much technical and experimental wizardry being needed to work on all this.

Reference 1 suggests that there are other small animals which hear with their hairs, although this sort of hearing had been thought to be short range only, more short range than is the case here. There is also the thought that we hear through the hairs in our inner ears - so the only difference is that we invest in internal hairs, while the spiders take a chance and use rather more vulnerable external hairs.

The jumping spider illustrated comes from Nashville, Tennessee.

Reference 1: http://www.neuwritewest.org/blog/can-jumping-spiders-hear-with-their-leg-hair.