Spiders ‘smell’ with their legs – new research
Gabriele Uhl received funding for exploring the chemical sense of spiders from the German Science Foundation (DFG, grant number 451487045).
Hong-Lei Wang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Spiders have always lived alongside humans, so it’s surprising how much we still don’t know about them. One long-standing mystery was related to how spiders detect smells. Now, our latest research has finally uncovered the secret.
In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we demonstrated that male spiders use olfactory hairs called wall-pore sensilla on their legs as a “nose” to detect the sex pheromones released by female spiders.
Our discovery puts an end to a decade-long search for these elusive sensilla, which have now been both identified and mapped. It also opens up opportunities for in-depth studies on the mechanism underlying spiders’ olfaction.
