Spiders are covered with fine hairs that can detect the faint movements of an enemy creeping closer, or a prey insect moving nearby. Scientists had long thought that these hairs functioned like the hairs humans have in our ears
, which each tremble in response to a specific frequency and have to work together for us to hear sounds. But a new experiment
suggests that each individual hair on a spider is capable of responding to a whole spectrum of sound, thus acting as an ear all on its own. As Dave Mosher writes
at Wired:
The hairs responded best to sounds between about 40 Hz, a low rumble of bass, and 600 Hz, a car horn (humans ears can detect between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz). That they picked up such a wide range of frequencies at all could overturn previous assumptions about how trichobothria [as the hairs are ...
