Alisa Kanganis
Current Event 8
Gorman, James. “How the Jumping Spider Sees Its Prey.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Nov. 2018,
This article, “How the Jumping Spider Sees Its Prey”, by James Gorman describes the different aspects of jumping spiders eyesight. Jumping spiders leap to attack their prey, but how do they know where their prey is? To answer this, Elizabeth Jacob, a spider biologist, decided to look deeper into spiders vision. She even built a custom spider eye tracker, which is used to follow their gaze. This is one of only two spider eye trackers in the world! A jumping spider has 8 eyes in total, 2 of which pick up color and detail, 2 more look backwards, another 2 detect motion, and the function of the last 2 has not yet been determined. Using the spider eye tracker, Elizabeth Jacob and her team were able to conclude that jumping spiders have tunnel vision. Their sight is like shining a beam of light into a dark room. What can be more interesting than that? Well, it turns out that the pair of eyes that detect motion let the spider know where to look! When their motion eyes are blinded, the spiders are left clueless. The main takeaway is that these pairs of eyes, which are physically separate, work together.
This discovery does not impact society greatly. However, the scientists do plan on continuing research. They want to know how the spiders tiny brain can manage information from both sets of eyes simultaneously. This can be important in understanding spider cognition, which opens a whole other door to spider biologists, like Elizabeth Jacob.
Mainly, I wish that the author included more scientific information in his article. For instance, how is a spider eye tracker built and what does it look like? Or what is the significance of this study? It would even be interesting to learn more about how the spider eyes actually work. I would like to know how some eyes are designed only to see color and detail and other eyes are designed to see motion. Why did jumping spiders vision evolve like this and is it different from other spiders? Some contextualization would be a good touch as well, as most people do not have much background information on spiders.
Anabel Maldonado
ReplyDeleteCurrent Event #8
Ippolito C Even
November 12th, 2018
Gorman, James. “How the Jumping Spider Sees Its Prey.” The New York Times, The New York
Times, 6 Nov. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/science/spider-vision.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&p.
Alisa’s review was very intriguing for me. One thing Alisa clearly succeeded with was when she explained the purpose of this experiment. Sometimes, critics leave out information simply because they think their audience already knows it. Yet, Alisa’s introduction to this topic was very concise as she stated “Jumping spiders leap to attack their prey, but how do they know where their prey is? To answer this, Elizabeth Jacob, a spider biologist, decided to look deeper into spiders vision.” Her clear explanation successfully set-up the rest of her information. Another thing I enjoyed about Alisa’s review was her detailed analysis of a spider’s eyes. Most students forget to include details such as these, but these truly showed her passion and knowledge of the topic. When including these details, she also thrived structurally. For instance, she first gave her readers background information about the eye functions, then later stated how these eyes are involved with this new experiment. Lastly, I really enjoyed her analysis of the impact this invention has on our world. Unlike every other review I read, she truthfully stated that this experiment will not impact our future too much. This left me with admiration because it was clear that she was still deeply interested in this topic, even though it didn’t impact us.
Although Alisa was very successful, she can fix several things. I think that when Alisa was explaining the takeaways from this experiment I was a bit confused. In the beginning I clearly understood the purpose of this. Yet towards the middle/end of the first paragraph I was confused because multiple results/takeaways were stated in many different sections. In other words, she ‘jumped all over the place’ with her results and takeaways. She could fix this if she summarized all of these results and take-aways into one sentence. Another possible solution would be to group all of these different results into one place (of the paragraph). In addition, I think that Alisa should have added more personal information as to why this topic is important to her or simply why they chose it. Clearly this is different from most topics that impact our society… so why choose it? If she fixed these two things, this review would be perfect!
In all honesty, I did not know much about spiders before this. I knew that they had eight legs… and that was pretty much it. After reading Alisa’s review, I was astonished as to see how much could go on in one small spider brain. One thing that really intrigued me from this experiment was the spiders different eye uses. I thought it was really interesting that each of the eight eyes play a different role: “8 eyes in total, 2 of which pick up color and detail, 2 more look backwards, another 2 detect motion, and the function of the last 2 has not yet been determined.” Overall, this review was very eye opening because I never truly realized how astonishing a brain is - even at such a small size.
Gorman, James. “How the Jumping Spider Sees Its Prey.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Nov. 2018,
ReplyDeletewww.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/science/spider-vision.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&p.
Raphael Munchenbach
13/11/2018
Alisa Kanganis, in her review of “How the jumping spider Sees Its Prey”, uses playful and engaging language to rope her audience into her article, and maintain engagement. Rhetorical questions like “but how do they know where their prey is?”(Kanganis) add an artful touch to the review, which helps her audience stay focused on the substance of her review, and makes reading the review enjoyable. Kanganis also provides extensive detail in her review when describing the jumping spider’s eyes, which allows the reader to develop a greater understanding of the subject matter being reviewed. Attention to detail this minute shows real care for the quality of her review. Kanganis also takes the unique and firm stance that despite how interesting this research may be, it is not very relevant to society. She convincingly argues this contrarian position, adding a strong touch of genuinity and thoughtfulness to her review.
Despite its strengths, Kanganis’ review is not without its flaws. Her use of the first person in the article decredibilizes her review, and undermines her article by providing the perspective of only herself, and does engage the audience, limiting the scope of the criticism.This can easily be improved by eliminating the use of personal pronouns, presenting the details of her review as more objective. In her paragraph about ongoing research on spiders, she goes into minimal detail about the research, leaving the reader confused on what is being done in furthering human knowledge on the jumping spider. This can be improved by providing more detail on ongoing research from the article, and drawing more heavily from the original source.
I knew next to nothing about jumping spiders before reading this. Jumping spiders hadn’t even crossed my brain before reading this review. Now, however, I have an even greater appreciation for the wonder of nature, and the oddities which make up every individual species on earth, no matter how big or small. From now on, I will look at the jumping spider, and other seemingly uninteresting organisms in a new light, and have even more content to satisfy my curiosity.
Gorman, James. “How the Jumping Spider Sees Its Prey.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Nov. 2018,
ReplyDeletewww.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/science/spider-vision.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&p.
I really liked that Alisa explained what tunnel vision is by using a simile so that the reader could understand how a spider sees. Alisa writes, “Their sight is like shining a beam of light into a dark room.” In her summary paragraph, Alisa also does a good job of engaging her audience. Alisa uses exclamation points and rhetorical questions which makes the reader think and encourages the reader to get excited. In her last paragraph, I like the way the Alisa noted that she wishes there was more scientific evidence and contextualization. As a reader, I was looking for more detail from Alisa, but when she explained the lack of detail in the article, I was able to understand why she did not include more detail in her summary.
Although Alisa did many things well, I wish she could have explained how the scientists concluded that the spiders had tunnel vision and the importance of making this discovery. I think that this article seemed more like an overview of an interesting but not very useful or detailed article which was slightly disappointing. I was curious why Alisa chose this article if it is not relevant to society. I think it would have been important for Alisa to explain, in her last paragraph, why understanding spider cognition is important and how it will open doors in the future.
While reading this article I was very surprised to learn that a profession exists where a biologist can study all of the specific aspects of spiders. I thought that spiders were relatively unimportant to biologists. Reading this article taught me that it is important not to dismiss small creatures who might seem insignificant because every animal has its role in the ecosystem. It also encouraged me to pursue what I am interested in because somebody very interested in spiders had to initiate the idea of spider biology.