At one time I was going to do auditory behavioral research with spiders, and chose tarantulas because they were fairly easy to work with (at least you could observe their reflex behavior readily — crouch to an air blast, and they are not web weavers). I would use classical conditioning to check for frequency discrimination associated with an air blast for similar frequencies pairs. \u00a0Anyhow, this creepy crawly box arrived while I was on vacation. A graduate assistant was assigned to put them in terrariums of some sort (shake each one out of his (?) little ice cream box container into a separate cage). Next morning — ELEVEN tarantulas in cages (of a dozen in shipment). Everybody on edge, secretaries having a fit. They moved all rats and spiders from the animal room, called in an exterminator who probably poisoned the environment for generations of future students. Every institution has its ghost — ours is a big black furry spider. They are not aggressive and can be readily handled if you care to do that sort of thing, and a bite is comparable to the sting of a hornet or yellow jacket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At one time I was going to do auditory behavioral research with spiders, and chose tarantulas because they were fairly easy to work with (at least you could observe their reflex behavior readily — crouch to an air blast, and they are not web weavers). I would use classical conditioning to check for frequency discrimination […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,8,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-humor","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=703"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":718,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703\/revisions\/718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}