Spin Masters

The thing about webspinners is they’re hard to tell apart: There are virtually no visible differences between many of the hundreds of species, making evolutionary questions hard to address. In an effort to distinguish one webspinner from the next, Professor Janice Edgerly-Rooks quantified their spin-steps. Would different patterns emerge? Would related species share patterns?

“Individuals of one species spun approximately 9,000 spin steps in the hour we filmed them,” Edgerly-Rooks says. Looking at the frequency of certain steps, the probability of going from one step to the other, she wondered, “How the heck do you analyze such complex data?”

As a trained vocalist, it dawned on Edgerly-Rooks: “What if I listened to the data?”

With the help of her biology students—many of whom are also musicians—Edgerly-Rooks translated the webspinners’ steps into music notes. For instance, coded for the keyboard, with middle C as the starting point, the step pattern of the right foot went higher in pitch while the left foot went down. “It was beautiful,” she says of the resulting music. “When I reflected on that, I realized it was because when you write a melody, you’re not jumping all across the scales, the notes tend to be near each other. And that’s how [these insects] spin silk. They do it in a nice little sequence.”

Sonification of Webspinners, Fifth Movement
By Elizabeth Jonasson ’20