Eco-localization of a prey in a spider orb web

Orb web spiders locate the position of a perturbation in the web because of a prey impact through highly sensitive slit sensilla at the tip of their legs. Thus, the web serves as a self-made extension of its sensory space which transmits vibrations from the perturbation point to the spider location. These vibrations may contain the information required by the spider to rapidly identify the position where the prey has impacted and approach to it before it flies away. For axially symmetric orb webs supported at the boundary and for a spider which stays at the center of the web, it was shown that the knowledge of the transverse deflection time history at the eight spider legs, for a sufficiently large interval of time, contains enough information to localize the position of the prey. In this article, we address the same inverse problem of localization of the prey, but we suppose that the spider knows only a small number of selected information of the transverse displacement, such as, for example, the maxima of the response of the time history at the eight control points. We show how this reduced information still allows the spider to obtain a fairly accurate angular localization of the prey, for different prey and orb web characteristics.

Automated summary

Orb web spiders locate prey impacts in the web through sensitive sensors on their legs, even with limited information, allowing for accurate prey localization.