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Analytical Cybernetics of Spider Navigation

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Neurobiology of Arachnids

Abstract

The navigation of the funnel web spider is a complex behavioral performance: it depends on the animal’s motivation, which in turn changes seasonally, diurnally, and by dint of various vicissitudes including the consequences of its own success of failure; it uses allothetic sources of spatial information such as the overall light distribution, specifically the sun and the polarization pattern of the sky, the structure and the inclination of the web, as well as idiothetic sources such as stored records of the animal’s own movements provided by proprioceptors or efference copies (see also Görner and Claas, Chap. XIV, this Vol.); it employs large arrays of receptors and effectors connected by a central nervous organization which might lead to perfect navigation, were it not for the everpresent influence of noise at all levels of the system.

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© 1985 Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg

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Mittelstaedt, H. (1985). Analytical Cybernetics of Spider Navigation. In: Barth, F.G. (eds) Neurobiology of Arachnids. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-70348-5_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-70348-5_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-70350-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-70348-5

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