Will Spiders Taste Food?
WouterSpiders are eight-legged creatures that are known to eat other living animals. They have special sensory organs on their legs and pedipalps that enable them to taste food. Some spiders are predators while others eat only dead or plant material. However, most are carnivores.
Some spiders are specialized in particular diets, such as the woodlice-eating spiders in the house spider genera Tegenaria and Dysdera. Some spiders feed on insects, ants, snakes, and other vertebrates. Some species are even known to take small fish and dead prey in the wild.
Some spiders are also scavengers, catching and eating dead bodies of other colony members. For example, the bat-catching spider Poecilotheria regalis feeds on rats in India. It is not common to see spiders consuming humans, but they have been recorded.
If you’re thinking about eating a spider, you’ll have to be prepared to kill it first. These arachnids need to be cooked to break down parasites in their body. And they are expensive to produce.
When you think about it, spiders aren’t that smart. But they do have several sensory organs, including a heart that beats through its dorsal cuticle. They can hear through tiny slits distributed over their body. They also use hairs to detect sound. The brain then interprets the signals as sound.
Many spiders have special sensory organs on their legs and mouths. This helps them detect the vibrations produced by sleeping people. If they feel that you are a threat, they’ll flee from you. Luckily, most of the time, they don’t actually bite.
