Spider With Three Super Powers | The Hunt | BBC Earth

To help her in her quest, she's equipped with three superpowers. First, an amazing approach to getting about. Portia is a jumping spider... able to leap up to 50 times her own body length. Nowhere seems beyond her reach. Next, her second superpower, superb eyesight... essential if she is to distinguish her prey in all this clutter. Because her prey doesn't stray. Portia is a spider-eating spider. This raises a few problems. Her lunch is three times her size... packed with venom... and surrounded by a sticky trap. Mission impossible? Not at all, because of her third superpower. Portia is a genius. She can map her world in three dimensions... and formulate a plan of attack. She can have an idea. The web-builder is blind. It won't have a clue that she's coming. Right on target and safely behind those fangs. But a mind as active as Portia's can always do with more brain food. Here, there's no anchor point for the abseil. But Portia has another idea. Instead of going to the spider... she will bring the spider to her. She plucks the strands to imitate struggling prey... drawing the spider in... to its death.

Channel: BBC Earth

Views: 11,361,548

Rating: 4.9137273 out of 5

Keywords: BBC, BBC Worldwide, Nature, Natural History, Animals, Wildlife, Wild, Portia Spider, Jumpin Spider, The Hunt, David Attenborough, Cannibalism, Spider, Web, bbc documentary, bbc earth, arachnid, super powers, nature, wildlife, insect

Id: UDtlvZGmHYk

Length: 3min 59sec (239 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/SheWitnessedMe]

If only we could get this spider power into some adolescent man. Some sort of spider-boy.

[u/[deleted]]

Now I want to hear all the cameraman's superpowers.

[u/jeepsntrees]

That camera work showing it "safely behind those fangs" is brilliant.

[u/Gondyr_shashlik]

Portia spiders are amazing and kind of mysterious in a way. Having only around 600 000 neurons, which is very few in fact, they possess cognitive abilities far beyond what you could expect. They observe, plan, try and learn from mistakes. I read a paper where an interesting hypothesis was proposed, where they used some kind of partitioning algorythms to use their few neurons as effectively as possible to achieve this. The way these spiders think may reveal many things about neuroscience, cognition etc.

[u/[deleted]]

Oh fuck me.

Spiders can think now?

A problem solving spider. We are all fucked.

[u/mailjozo]

I love these kind of videos, but wow those added sounds are a bit overkill. I think I actually heard robot sounds when the spider was moving?..

[u/MuckingFagical]

The abdomen at 3:21 thoroughly creeped me out.

[u/AqueousKitten]

A spider-eating spider is the least worst spider that can exist.

[u/yotdog2000]

Crazy interesting! The movements almost looked like stop motion a few times.