Eight Eyes Good
On a recent large campout, I met a new friend (Andy) who was equally fascinated by the hidden world of biology as I am. We talked about many things, including animal perception. He was both excited and repulsed by the eyes of spiders, especially with the ones that don’t use webs, such as Jumping Spiders and Hunting Spiders. Unlike the Orb Weavers, which rely on web vibrations to sense the physical world around them, these arachnids use a complex system of visual perception to hunt their prey.
Most spiders have eight eyes. Who knew? Well, apparently, just about everyone.
Jumping Spider Eyes.jpg, photo by Opoterser, Summer 2007. Licensed under CC BY 3.0.
Eyes of A Hunter: The Vision of Jumping Spiders
When I got home, I started reading about spider vision, especially in jumping spiders. Unlike the web-weaving spiders, who passively capture their prey, these spiders are active hunters, operating like a cat, where they stalk their prey and then pounce on them.
Much has been written about spider vision, as covered in articles such as this one, but I’ll summarize some of the key points.
How Eight Eyes Work Together
Jumping spiders don’t just have eight eyes; they have eight eyes that collaborate in real time to give them a nearly 360-degree field of view.
What’s so remarkable is that their eyesight is exceptionally sharp for their tiny size. Their two very large forward-facing principal eyes act like their telephoto lenses that sit on moveable tubes that swivel independently, providing sharp, colorful, high-resolution, detailed vision in a narrow “X-shaped” zone. Meanwhile, the other three smaller sets of eyes continuously detect and monitor black-and-white motion across a wide field, including behind them, like our peripheral vision, fuzzy and indistinct.
Together, the system works much like our own central and peripheral vision, which only gives us a limited 210-degree field of view. We have to use mirrors on our cars to cover our blind spots, but a jumping spider carries its own built-in 360-degree surveillance system of the world around it.
Diagram of the approximate visual fields of a jumping spider (Phidippus), as viewed from above, by David E. Hill. Originally published as Figure 6 in Peckhamia 83.1 (2010): 1–103. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Empathy Through Vision
While I found all of this reading to be utterly fascinating, it begged a deeper question, and the one that I think about a lot, which is how do we develop a true understanding, actual empathy with another animal that perceives the world so differently, but not that differently than ours?
Where I landed, and I usually shy away from technical solutions, would be a virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) experience, where a headset would feed information into a constructed 3D world or the actual world directly into your eyes, simulating what the spider would see. It’d be fascinating to “see” as the jumping spider does. We’d still, of course, have our own visual mechanism with our weak two-eyed vision to contend with, so it wouldn’t be how a spider actually perceives the world, but with the proper gear, we could get a 360 feed into our brain.
At first, it might feel like sensory overload, similar to trying to watch eight screens at once and still follow each of the eight stories. But our brains are remarkably adaptable; we could start stitching those eight feeds into something coherent and relatable.
Beyond vision, imagine that we could sense subtle vibrations in the web like an Orb Weaver, or like Jumping Spiders that can see ultraviolet patterns that our own eyes are incapable of seeing. The simple act of trying to live inside their sensory world, even briefly, might allow us to perceive genuine empathy, as we are doing so in a way that begins to shift our brains towards understanding how the spider’s brain works to perceive its world.
Vision as a Bridge to the Creatures We Share the World With
And that’s what I think about, with my own artwork, and how to use technology to create some sort of empathy. As we understand the perils of the anthropomorphic view of the world, empathy with other creatures who share our planet seems like a good starting place.
And vision offers a natural bridge; it’s how we identify and orient ourselves, how we map meaning onto the world that we see around us. To try to borrow another species’ way of seeing is not just an experiment in perception; it’s a way of loosening the boundaries of our own perspectives. What would it do to our sense of wonder if we could sense our world the way a spider does, with the overlapping vision of eight eyes, the ultraviolet patterns our eyes cannot detect, or the subtle tremors detected in the webs that give physical cues to the location of prey and environmental variables?
The very act of trying to see through another set of eyes asks us to admit our limits and imagine more generously, and begin relating differently to the creatures that we share our world with.