“What you doing tonight?” one scientist said to the other. “I’m going dose some spiders on every drug known to man and see what kind of webs they spin.” “Cool, you’re crazy man. You’re crazy,” the first scientist said.
That probably didn’t happen, but this did: In 1948 H.M. Peters started making a movie about about spiders and their webbing techniques. When he launched the experiment, the basic idea was to take photos of Orb spiders spinning their webs. When he became frustrated with working between 2am and 5am every morning, he decided to alter their internal clocks as opposed to his own.
So Peters hired Peter Witt, a pharmacologist. Together they came up with the plan to feed spiders with water laced with different drugs. They used everything from amphetamine to caffeine, LSD to cannabis. When the experiment started, all Peter wanted to do was to get the spiders to spin their webs at a certain time of day so his research would be catered around his own sleep schedule.
His results however proved to be far more interesting. The spiders still continued their morning spinning rituals, but they did notice that the webs were spun much differently when compared to when they were sober.
Eventually, H.M Peters threw in the towel on the research. Witt however remained fascinated by the concept, and continued to study the effects of spiders on drugs for years on end until he died in 1998.
Interestingly, Witt believed that the effects of substances on the Orb spider were far more reliable when compared to the effects on lab animals or even humans, and his research has given us all an interesting insight to the world of the Orb spider and the stuff they get up to when they are super high.