Resources, sociality, and aggregation

During my postdoc work with Alex Jordan at the MPI of Animal Behavior, we collaborated with Studio Tomás Saraceno in Berlin. STS kindly hosted me as a Scientist-in-Residence, where I developed an extended prototype for improved scanning of complex three-dimensional spider web structures, based on the Spider Web Scan laser-supported tomographic apparatus and method developed by Tomás and STS in collaboration with the TU Darmstadt in 2009/2010.

I built an experimental arena that could be imaged with the scanner (without reflections) to use in an experiment examining the influence of resource levels on aggregation, territoriality, and social behavior in the bridge spider, Larinioides sclopetarius.

With Roland Mühlethaler and the STS spider team, I started to pilot this experiment while working to reconstruct web geometry from the scans, achieving some cool early results towards 3D reconstruction of complex webs. Tomás and STS have since continued this work to great success with Markus Buehler’s group at MIT, as described in the recent paper by Su et al.