Her new research, published August 8 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, reveals jumping spiders experience a sleep-like state with rapid eye movements similar to those observed in dreaming humans. It wasn’t long before Rößler set up a nursery for baby spiders in her lab to observe their nightly dangles. “The way they twitched just made me think of dogs and cats dreaming,” Rößler says. After nightfall, some jumping spiders, about the size of her pinky fingernail, retired to little silken pouches called “retreats.” She found others immobile, dangling upside-down from a single strand of silk with legs neatly curled-and occasionally moving. Rößler (pronounced RUES-slur) quickly became enchanted by the field’s tiny jumping spiders. But during the coronavirus lockdowns of 2020, the best she could do was a patch of scrubby grass near her home in Trier, Germany. Research “in the field” typically means a journey to the remote Brazilian Amazon for Daniela Rößler, an ecologist the University of Konstanz.
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