Spiders ‘smell’ with their legs – new research

By Dan-Dan Zhang, Researcher of Sensory Biology, Lund University
Gabriele Uhl, Professor of General and Systematic Zoology, University of Greifswald
Hong-Lei Wang, Researcher, Sensory Biology, Lund University

Spiders have always lived alongside humans, so it’s surprising how much we still don’t know about them. One long-standing mystery was related to how spiders detect smells. Now, our latest research has finally uncovered the secret.

In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we demonstrated that male spiders use olfactory hairs called wall-pore sensilla on their legs as a “nose” to detect the sex pheromones released by female spiders.

Our discovery puts an end…

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