Is it really possible to believe that spiders would be dreaming? Well, a new study would show that crawling spiders have been experiencing periods of rapidly shifting eye movement during the sleep, it would be considered as a sleep stage which has been related to dreaming.

HIGHLIGHTS
Spiders do experience shifting eye movement during they have fallen sleep
The small spiders sleep upside down hanging by a strand of silk
Spiders’ movements would suggest that they would have been dreaming

As per a professor of neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has mentioned that the finding could be a game changer in scientists’ understanding of sleep in numerous animals. For the study, which got published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers have examined the infrared videos of dozens of young jumping spiders which were sleeping at night. The small spiders those who would capture their prey by using their acute vision and jumping prowess, sleep upside down hanging by a strand of silk.

Well, the videos portrayed that the spiders would twitch and curled their legs as their so-called retinal tubules, which were considered as the components of their lidless eyes had shifted to point out that they were experiencing rapid-eye-movement, or REM, sleep. The periods of REM would always come every 15 to 20 minutes, where each period would last about 90 seconds.

Young spiders’ bodies have been developing which were nearly transparent, which makes it possible to detect the movements of their retinal tubules. Along with this, twitching and curling were also observed in the legs of thumbnail-size adult jumping spiders, whose pigmentation would make it difficult to observe their retinal tubules.

According to Daniela Roessler, a postdoctoral fellow at Germany’s University of Konstanz and the lead author of the study has mentioned that “When I saw for the first time these twitching faces, it simply blew my mind as it had appeared like when cats or dogs dream.”

Well, the new study had not measured activity within the spiders’ poppyseed-size brains. However, Dr. Roessler has mentioned that she had believed that the spiders’ movements had suggested her that they were dreaming maybe it would be replaying some daytime activity. She even mentioned that “I do assume that they were dreaming. But scientifically it provided the idea that it would be going to become a different story.”

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