The case of the Dancing Dune Spidrids: are they intelligent?

The second episode of my spidrid microdocumentary series has just been published on YouTube and Instagram and is now visible on this blog too. The YouTube version has the highest quality. 

This episode focuses on a species of spridrid in a dune habitat, but the episode is not so muuch about the habitat as it is about behaviour of the animals. That is complex, because any choice I make regarding animal behaviour immediately triggers many implications and assumptions. 

While making these videos, I quickly found that making a film requires a different focal point than the painting-plus-text approach that I used so far. For a painting to work, its composition, use of colour and of dark and light tones are of prime importance. I will go so far as to say that the subject matter comes second. In video, things need to happen, so the animals need to do something that forms a story. I started making spidrid animations with an initial emphasis on their radial build and their locomotion. This was the logical thing to do, but you cannot show some spidrid changing direction without rotating its body ten times and still expect people to remain interested. What can spidrids do, besides walking, that attracts interest? 

 

Well, in nature documentaries carnage always grabs the attention, but spidrids aren't big fierce predators, so no spouts of crimson blood there (greenish blue blood, actually, but never mind). There is also the fact that animating the spidrid's four mouth limbs as well as its central ventral beak on its tentacular 'neck' would require as much programming effort as the rest of the animal put together. 

There's also sex of course, but you may be surprised to learn that I focused on biomechanics to such a degree that I never gave any attention to whether spidrids produce eggs, live young, or something else. It works, that's enough for now. One fundamental matter here is that producing sperm cells is metabolically much cheaper than to produce all the material needed to build functional offspring. It should be much easier for large animals than for small animals to afford the high metabolic cost of that latter, female, route. And yet many male animals are larger than females, showing that other considerations, such as scaring off male competition, may be more important. Somewhere in that balance between costs there should be room for animals to change sex in accordance with their size as they grow throughout life. That was in fact what I thought when I designed the large spidrid in the video. That giant specimen in the video is one and a half time larger than the smaller ones, so it is at least three times as heavy (it has appropriately thicker legs). Its size ensures dominance, but the video leaves it open whether the animal is a male approaching females or the opposite. At any rate, you may safely assume that the giant has reproduction in mind. 

The third aspect that may attracts interest is social interaction, which the video focuses on. These spidrids use complex body movements and vocal cues to interact with one another. Their colours are probably also a social sign. The more animals there are, the more complex their interactions become. Does that mean they are then signalling to several others at the same time? That would make them rather clever. The existence of complex social interactions is probably tied to intelligence; the 'social intelligence hypothesis' even holds that social interactions were a major driver of human brain evolution. The same may well apply to other bright social animals, such as ravens and other smart birds. Could spidrids have a level of intelligence approaching or equalling that of birds? Why couldn't they? I for one do not believe that the obligatory requirements for intelligence throughout the universe include being an upright ape with opposable thumbs.