In lab experiments, spiders changed how they constructed their webs in noisy environments, and rural and urban spiders responded differently
Rudy Molinek – ReporterMarch 25, 2025
Living in a city can be a noisy existence. Long-time residents grow used to the cacophony, but the buzz of traffic, wail of sirens, hum of air conditioners and bustle of people at all hours could be enough to drive a newcomer up the wall. That experience, a new study finds, is also true for some spiders.
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Researchers compared spiders from rural and urban environments and found they change how they build their webs when exposed to noisy conditions—but a spider’s coping strategy varied based on its past sound exposure, according to their paper published this month in Current Biology.
“Urban and rural spiders are reacting differently when they’re put into a noisy environment,” Brandi Pessman, a biologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and lead author of the study, says in a statement. “This means that spiders with different experiences with noise—whether they themselves experienced it or their mothers passed it down to them across generations—respond differently.”
The team focused on the Pennsylvania grass spider (Agelenopsis pennsylvanica), a quarter-sized arachnid that’s widespread across North America. Also known as funnel-weaving spiders, these creatures build tapered, tube-shaped webs that aren’t sticky. They wait until unsuspecting prey enters the funnel before quickly moving to bite and immobilize their meal.
This technique depends on the spider being able to instantaneously detect the vibration when an insect has bumped into its web. Any outside noise could make that harder.
“They really rely on those accurate vibrations to determine where the prey is, what the prey is and whether to attack,” Pessman tells the New York Times’Joshua Rapp Learn.
The researchers collected spiders from both urban and rural settings, then brought them back to the lab. There, they placed the spiders in containers outfitted with speakers that played either loud or quiet sounds for four days. At the end of the experiment, they analyzed the webs by applying vibrations and seeing how the spider silk responded.
Under loud conditions, the spiders from urban areas had woven webs that dampened the applied vibrations, while rural spiders amplified them instead.
Essentially, city spiders responded to noise by soundproofing—their webs seemingly muffled the sounds of the environment. Those webs, overall, sent fewer vibrations to the spider. While this adaptation might also block out the sounds of potential mates or some prey, per the New York Times, it also could allow the city spiders to pick up on nearby prey without becoming overstimulated.
Meanwhile, rural spiders that weren’t used to the din reacted by making their webs more sensitive to try to detect prey amid the constant noise. For the spiders from out of town, it was like turning the volume up to better hear the radio while running a blender.
“Rural spiders are not used to as much noise in their environment,” Pessman says in the statement. “When they suddenly get a lot of noise, they might try to ‘turn up’ the volume in their webs or amplify what’s coming in to better hear certain signals above the noise.”
The researchers still aren’t sure how exactly the spiders make these changes in their webs, and they plan to explore the mechanisms in future studies using videos and tracking software. For now, they suspect it could have something to do with placement of anchor points, tension on the silk or the overall structure of the web.
This isn’t the first time scientists have investigated how spiders respond to noise or tested the sensitivity of their webs to vibrations. In 2017, a study found populations of spiders and other insects drop around noisy natural gas compressors, and last year, researchers turned to spider webs to try to create a more sensitive microphone.
As Beth Mortimer, a biologist at the University of Oxford in England who was not involved in the new study, tells the New York Times, “the vibration sense tends to be the forgotten sense in the natural world.”
