In order to adequately appreciate the vibratory world spiders live in, we have to consider it in a broad biological context. The lecture will focus on the courtship behavior of a large Central American wandering spider. This spider lives in close association with monocotyledonous plants which also serve as the transmission channels for its vibratory courtship signals. Roughly following a bottom-up approach, the vibration sensors, the vibratory signals, neural responses to vibrations, species recognition and reproductive isolation will be related to one another while emphasizing the virtues of blending reductionist experiments with observations in the field. The brain and thus behavior and cognition to a considerable extent are at the mercy of the information provided by sensory systems.
Sense organs function like biological interfaces between the environment and the organism.
They enable an animal to draw a picture of its environment sufficiently detailed to be used for the guidance of its behavior. This applies to a protozoan in the same way it does to a fish, a monkey, and humans. However, the sensory worlds animals live in are highly filtered, species-specific, and diverse. They can only be fully understood in a broad and organismic context. Examples will be given to illustrate this at several levels of organization and to clarify a few principles at work when sensory information is acquired and used by the organism in a way that obviously makes sense.