Jumping Spiders!

Apparently it's ugly animal week here at Bioluminate.  Here's another animal that definitely falls into the category of "so ugly it's cute."

This image is from here.  I came across this animal listening to Dr. Bruno Olhausen from UC Berkeley give at talk at the USC Integrative Theoretical Neuroscience symposium.  Dr. Olhausen research focuses on building a model of visual cortex. The cortex is the layered brain structure in mammals which gives our brain its distinct rippled look.  The primary visual cortex (V1)  processes the images we see in the world by breaking down natural images into components (for example some neurons respond best to lines in orientated in a certain directions). Higher regions of visual cortex then build these components into coherent images and interpret them. This all happens so fast that we can look at an object and say cup, or dog or cat and it seems simple, but when you think about it's actually a difficult task.  The brain must be able to recognize objects with different shapes and patterns on different backgrounds, from different angles and we can even recognize an object if it is moving through space.  Computer scientist have been attempting to build computer algorithms to allow computers to accomplish basic object recognition but this has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult task!  By building models to understand how visual objects are processed by the visual cortex Dr. Olhausen and colleagues hope to be able to apply this knowledge to practical applications.

However, as Dr. Olhausen pointed out to us, even animals with no cortex and a simple nervous system are better at recognizing objects than our best computer models. Jumping spiders are different from most spiders in that they don't build webs, instead they are visual predators.  Jumping spiders have 8 pairs of eyes 3 of which provide fuzzy peripheral vision (they literally have eyes on the back of their head) and 1 pair in the front which have good resolution and allow them to recognize mates and prey.  When a male spider is presented with a female spider or even just an image that sufficiently approximates a spider he will perform an elaborate mating dance, check out the video, it's pretty hilarious.  Even a tiny 1 day old spider is able to recognize, stalk and kill its prey.  Jumping spiders are another example of how biology has achieved elegant solutions to complex problems.