Two golden silk orb weavers lived on the ISS for two months; most space-built webs became nearly symmetric, but under light the spiders used brightness as a new sense of up

Every astronaut aboard the International Space Station had to get used to microgravity. Two spiders had to solve the same task, and the way they did it astonished the scientists watching. A study titled "Spiders in space-orb-web-related behavior in zero gravity," published in Science and indexed on PubMed, describes an experiment with two young adult golden silk orb weavers. The two arachnids were sent to the International Space Station, each in its own separate habitat, for two months in 2011, while two more of the same age and species stayed behind on Earth in identical, separate habitats as a comparison group. Scientists wanted to see how the absence of gravity would affect spiders' ability to make their signature webs and whether they could notice any differences between the two groups.

The species built for asymmetry