Spiders do it - is it possible and practical to use their concepts?
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Many arthropods, including mosquitoes and spiders, don’t have organs that perceive a sound’s pressure waves at all. Instead they detect the airflow generated by a sound: specialized hairs on their body sense the speed and direction of air particles as those particles are swept up by a sound wave. And as Miles and his team found in 2022, some spiders even fully outsource hearing to their web: sounds’ airflow causes the silky strands to vibrate, which the arachnids can sense through touch.
After this discovery, the researchers set out to determine if an airflow-based detector could actually sense and distinguish between the range of frequencies needed for a human-use microphone—not just those that interest hungry spiders. The Binghamton team took strands of silk from orb weaver arachnids called bridge spiders (which conveniently live in the university’s nature preserve) and used a laser vibrometer to record how they responded to different sound frequencies.
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