"If I see a spider in my house, I put it in a cup, and then I take it outside. I save it. What is wrong with me?" -Jacqueline Emerson

There's something not only incredibly useful but also beautiful about the intricate structure of a spider web. It's such a universally admired phenomenon that it's become a metaphor for many other things, as Welbilt sings you in their song,

Spiderweb.

Dependent on the type of spider and various environmental factors, the web can take on any number of beautiful shapes.

Image credit: Darlyne Murawski, via National Geographic Society, 2007.

Image credit: public domain image.

But all of that can change in a heartbeat, dependent on... how you drug the spider.

Image credit: Peter Witt.

The size and shape of the web that spiders build, as first determined by P.N. Witt in 1948, is severely affected by psychoactive drugs, including amphetamine, mescaline, strychnine, LSD and caffeine.

Wish I knew the source for this; part of the hazards of picking up an image from tumblr!

Bizarrely enough, low doses of LSD actually result in more ordered spider webs, while higher doses (and all doses of other drugs) result in more disordered webs.

Image credit: Rainer Foelix, in his book “Biology of Spiders”; Dr. P.N. Witt.

More recently, a group of NASA scientists studied the effects of a few different drugs on European garden spiders, where they discovered that they could use the spiders (and their webs) for quantitative drug detection tests!

Image credit: D. A. Noever, R. J. Cronise, and R. A. Relwani. 1995. Using spider-web patterns to determine toxicity. NASA Tech Briefs 19(4):82.

Finally, a video was made lampooning this research, and it's just... well, you'll have to watch for yourself.

See you back here on Monday for some real, physical science, and hope you have a great weekend until then!