Sorry, Prey. Black Widows Have Surprisingly Good Memory

Black widows must despise Clint Sergi. While working on his PhD in biology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sergi spent his time designing little challenges for spiders--which often involved rewarding them with tasty dead crickets, or confounding them by stealing the crickets away. "The big question that motivated the work was just wanting to know what is going on inside the minds of animals," he says. Biologists already know spider brains aren't like human brains. Their sensory world is geared for life in webs and dark corners.