I have to admire the level of professionalism it takes to not give a single mealworm to a spider you have been watching for forty years.
Reminded me of The Onion's "Expert Wasted Entire Life Studying Anteaters":
I wonder how long it would have lived without the wasps' interference.
Huge respect. Always amazed by scientists sticking with studies like that.
Research article reporting the spider's death by Leanda Denise Mason, Grant Wardell-Johnson and Barbara York Main
https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%...
I think about this a lot in the context of conversations about intelligence. If spiders can have complex behaviors hard-coded, humans certainly do too. (In other words, the Tabula Rasa theory is wrong.) The ability to learn language and emotion are certainly two examples. We are pretty good at certain things (learning language, picking up social cues) and relatively bad at others (calculating an 18% tip).
So if you’re going to measure “intelligence” the first thing you’ll need to do is choose what to measure. What questions do you ask? You might be inclined to pick things we humans think are important. But then that’s not an objective universal measurement, at best it’s yardstick for human cognitive abilities.