From this first visit, a mutual collaboration and interest in spider vibrational communication was born, which led to Mühlethaler eventually taking up a position within Saraceno’s Spider/Web Research Group, heading up the bioacoustic experimental research program. Following this, Hoch and Mühlethaler returned to Saraceno’s studio with a Laser Doppler Vibrometer (PDV-100), which they used to measure the vibrational signal propagation in a planar Nephila web and the bouncing signals produced by a Cyrtophora spider in its (modified orb) tent web. This thread of biotremological research began in 2013 after Saraceno first came into contact with Mühlethaler (then a researcher at the Museum of Natural History Berlin), Hoch and Wessel ’s research into vibrational communications in insects - a meeting mediated by Saraceno’s visiting research colleague, arachnologist Yael Lubin. This strand of research is led by in-house Spider/Web Research Group researcher Roland Mühlethaler, and through collaborations with biotremology experts Hannelore Hoch and Andreas Wessel (Museum of Natural History, Berlin), as well as Peggy Hill (University of Tulsa). The Spider/Web Research Group’s research into biotremology extends Saraceno’s interest in exploring the possibilities for interspecific communication, and our capacity to communicate with our nonhuman kin, through practices of attuning to and producing vibrational signals.
The study of the seismic signals produced and received by the spider fall under the relatively new scientific discipline of biotremology: the study of vibrational communication in animals. The spider/web is thus considered a material extension of the spider’s own senses, and-some argue-of its mind. Essentially blind, the web-building spider creates an image of the world through the vibrations it sends and receives through the web, which also functions as an organic and specialised instrument for transmitting these seismic signals.
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