Science guy knows cool stuff

I was perusing some books on Powell's website (Oregon bookstore that rocks)...and came across this interesting tidbit put together by their resident "science guy" (by the name of Doug Brown). I thought this was damn cool.

Orb web spiders usually make their webs between 2 and 5 in the morning. Back in the 60's, an impatient entomologist wanted to shift the time his spiders made their webs, so he wouldn't have to get up in the middle of the night to observe them. On a wacky notion, he dissolved some amphetamines in water and fed it to the spiders. Interestingly, they still made their webs at the same time, but the webs looked different. The angles of the radial strands were consistently off from the norm. Thus began a bizarre new field of study: drug webs. Over the years, researchers have fed poor spiders caffeine, amphetamines, mescaline, THC, and even LSD, to see how it would affect their web-making abilities. In all cases, the different drugs had consistent effects on how the webs changed. Caffeine webs, for instance, are smaller than normal, but wider.


(2 points to the science guy for mentioning caffeine in his drug cocktail...)

http://www.powells.com/portal/NatureStudies.html