Spiders On Drugs

Spiders on drugs sounds like a joke, and there is a famous comedy video by that name, but the webs on this page are real science. Starting in 1948, pharmacologist Peter Witt fed garden spiders tiny doses of different drugs and photographed the webs they built afterward. NASA scientists repeated the idea in 1995. The results are below, and once you know what a normal web looks like, you can spot what each drug did at a glance.

We used to host an interactive Flash animation here that let you pick the drug and watch the web get built. Flash is long gone, so the animation is too. The real web photos were always the interesting part anyway.

What Each Drug Did to the Web

Spiders on Caffeine
Caffeine produced the most chaotic web of all: a few threads strung almost at random, with no working spiral. Of everything tested, the everyday drug wrecked the web worst. Perhaps I should stop drinking Dew!

Spider on Mescaline
This web came from a spider that ate a fly dosed with mescaline, the extract from peyote. The web keeps its overall shape but loses its regularity.

Spider Web on Hash
Hash left the web recognizable but unfinished. The spider started normally, then quit partway through.

Spider on LSD
LSD produced a web that is strangely orderly but sparse. The spider skipped a major portion of the detail work.

A Normal Spider Web
For comparison, here is a web from a spider on nothing at all: even spacing, a complete spiral, a working design.

Researchers later used web patterns as a rough toxicity test, since the finished web records how scrambled its builder was.

Wondering what the spiders took that built the giant web at Lake Tawakoni? Nothing at all. See our Giant Spider Web page for that story. And if you want the comedy video this page’s name always brings up, our Spider on Crack page has it.