Visual perception of motion in a hunting spider

Abstract

Like most other spiders Cupiennius salei (Keyserling 1877) has two different eye types, one pair of principal eyes and three pairs of secondary eyes. The principal eyes have two eye muscles each, which allow movement of the retina and are mainly used for the discrimination of stationary objects. The secondary eyes without such eye muscles are supposed to detect moving objects. Masking experiments were used to analyse the role of these two eye types in motion detection. In a white arena the animals were stimulated with short sequences of moving black bars. The principal eyes move involuntarily when objects are moving within the visual field of an ipsilateral secondary eye. The eye muscle activity of the principal eyes was recorded using single channel telemetry, and activity changes were taken as an indicator for the perception of motion. Masking the principal eyes with black paint and presenting a moving visual stimulus did not modify the induced muscle activity, whereas masking the secondary eyes eliminated the increase in eye muscle activity. This suggests that the secondary eyes are responsible for movement detection. We conclude that the animals are able to detect moving targets visually only with the secondary eyes. The principal eyes, by contrast, do not seem to be involved in the detection of moving targets.