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Toxicity of drugs - caffeine vs marijuana
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Spiders on Marijuana could spin their webs reasonably well, bet appeared to lose concentration half-way through.
Spiders given Benzedrine, or speed, were said to have spun their webs “with great gusto, but apparently without much planning, leaving large holes.”
Spiders on caffeine were incapable of spinning anything better than a few threads strung together at random.
Not surprisingly, spiders given chloral hydrate, an ingredient used in sleeping pills, dozed off before they even got started.
The scientist noted that a good way to measure the toxicity of drugs was to compare the number of completed sides in the web. The more toxic the chemical, the more deformed the spider’s web.
Based on their findings so far, it appears that caffeine is quite highly toxic – more so than even marijuana and speed.
Coffee addicts, take note.
The above article, which I ran in a 1995 issue of The Good Life, was one of those rare gems of a find when I embarked on posting my articles online.
Before I posted this, I decided to do a google search on "spiders toxicity of drugs" and found much more than what was presented above. One additional bit of information came from an article written by Steve Connor, who quoted a spider specialist:
Paul Hillard, spider specialist at the Natural History Museum in London, said researchers first discovered the effects of psychotropic drugs on spiders during experiments at the end of 1960s. The researchers fed caffeine to spiders in hope of making them spin webs in the late evening rather than the early dawn. The result was eccentric webs rather than earlier spinning, he said.
Click here to read Steve Connor's article on spiders and toxicity of drugs.
But I did discover another rare gem: A tongue in cheek video based on the the NASA research, titled Effects of Alcohol and Drugs on Spider Webs. It's quite funny. View it by clicking here.