Some animals respond in a very particular way to drugs intended for human consumption. Reports of deer devouring marijuana plantations go back at least to 2007, and there is never a shortage of accidental YouTube videos with cats and dogs. However, in recent decades, several experiments have been carried out, and one in particular was conducted by NASA. In April 1995, agency scientists decided to drug European garden spiders to evaluate the toxicity of each substance and study its effects on web construction.
The original story dates back to 1948, when a German zoologist named H.M. Peters grew frustrated with the behavior of the spiders he was studying. The problem was that the little ones built their webs between two and five in the morning, a very inconvenient schedule for Peters. That is how he contacted his friend and pharmacologist P.N. Witt and asked whether there was some kind of stimulant chemical that could shift the spider's building schedule a bit.
The chosen stimulant was amphetamine, and although Peters did not get his way (the spiders did not change their hours), he discovered that web construction became more chaotic and disorganized. Pharmacologist Witt decided to continue the practice, exploring the impact of marijuana, LSD, mescaline, and caffeine. Witt's technique was based on mixing the drugs with sugar water and injecting the liquid into flies that served as food for the spiders.
As expected, the practical applications of such a study were almost nil, and it was abandoned until 1995, when NASA repeated several of Witt's experiments and analyzed the webs with statistical tools and image processing. That allowed them to quantify the differences between a normal web and one built while intoxicated, opening the possibility of using spiders to measure the toxicity of certain substances instead of mice, saving time and money.
The substances tested
Here is a look at some of the substances involved in these experiments.
