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What
made you "listen in" on the Jumping spiders?
Dr.
Madison had recorded sounds from one species that's found
in Canada, and so he thought that maybe some other species
were singing, too. He had talked to my advisor Dr. Hoy about
it, and it had been in the back of his mind for awhile. So,
when I came from Arizona and was keen on doing things that
used some complicated systems he mentioned it. We all wound
up being surprised by how elaborate these songs were.
How
did you go about your research?
The
method is used by several labs. We're detecting vibrations
- they are not singing, nor producing airborne songs like
humans would or like crickets would. So, what they are doing
is vibrating and then sending the vibrations through the ground.
As humans, that's not a sense that we're tuned into at all.
So, we had to figure out a way to record these vibrations.
They way that we did it here was the cheap way of doing it.
We
thought of an old phonograph needle. We tore one apart and
took the pieces that detect the vibrations as the needle goes
into the record's groove, and used them to detect the spiders'
vibrations.
I'm
also collaborating with some people at the University of Toronto
who have really fancy equipment to detect vibrations- this
thing called a laser Doppler vibrometer which uses a laser
beam to detect vibrations on a substrate.
Either
way, we end up with a recording. We plug it into what we're
videotaping with - we're pretending it's a microphone, basically.
But instead of recording sound waves traveling in the air,
it's recording vibrations traveling through the substrate.
What
does a female jumping spider look for in a mate?
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If you can make something for illiterate people who
speak an unusual dialect in the middle of India...you
can make wireless technology for a young kid who doesn't
read yet.
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These
are the things that I'm trying to look at right now. I think
it's going to be something like vigorousness of leg movements
and how coordinated they are. What I'm finding out is that
they also sing while they are dancing, so, what I think is
going to happen, is that bigger males will be able to sing
more loudly. Also how they coordinate the singing and the
dancing is likely to be important. It's very precisely coordinated,
and that might carry information in how well they are able
to match them up. 
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