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Why does Britain’s mapping agency have a box of spiders?
(www.youtube.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Chris Spargo
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In a nutshell: spider's are natural astronomers and were trained to follow specific stars, meaning they were reliable in laying down dependable anchor lines for reference mapping by simply following their web trails.
The ordinance survey would breed millions of these garden spiders in boxes, trained on Polaris, and then set them loose along the south coast of England, following their webs all the way up to Scotland.
It's amazing what we did before computers
Also briefly touches on some trigonometry that they had to teach the spiders, pretty interesting tidbit
I mean that segment about how the Ancient Greeks learned their geometric proofs from Orb Weaver nesting patterns, only for us to teach it back to them a millennia later is pure poetry
I'm very far from being a chemist but the fact that a pesticide was able to remove that instinct from them was pretty crazy to me and was really sad, I wonder what else we're wiping out from other critters. I'm glad we got it back but the video didn't really go into how well they understand the math or if they're just kinda copying each other's work.
Yeah it got a bit hand-wavey towards the end there, and once he started talking about magnets I just mentally tuned out since a lot of the physics went over my head. Still, it's quite profound to know they could have easily been the dominant species on the planet had we not nerfed them with our new-age agricultural practices
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