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Most people would see a dead spider and discard the insect. A couple of engineers at Rice University had other ideas.

The engineers at the Houston university recently unveiled a study outlining how they took dead spiders and turned them into mechanical grippers that could pick up different types of objects, even things that outweighed the deceased insect.

The idea came to them after thinking about how spiders move their limbs. Unlike human beings and other mammals, which use their nervous systems to send signals to their muscles to contract, spiders use hydraulics.

Essentially, spiders have a chamber near their heads that sends blood shooting through their body and into their limbs, forcing them to extend. When the pressure from the blood is relieved, the legs contract.

“We were moving stuff around in the lab and we noticed a curled up spider at the edge of the hallway,” lead author Faye Yap said, recounting the moment that spurred the eventual study. “We were really curious as to why spiders curl up after they die.”

After a quick internet search, they found their answer. But it only generated more curiosity.

“At the time, we were thinking, ‘Oh, this is super interesting.’ We wanted to find a way to leverage this mechanism,” she added.

After digging deeper into arachnid anatomy, they realized the spider's hydraulic chamber, or parasoma, actually has separate internal valves that allow the insect to move each leg individually.

“The dead spider isn’t controlling these valves,” Daniel Preston, a professor at Rice's engineering who assisted with the study, said. “They’re all open. That worked out in our favor in this study, because it allowed us to control all the legs at the same time."

Utilizing wolf spider cadavers, the engineers also realized they could replace the blood flow with a puff of air instead, causing the same hydraulic response in the spiders' legs.

Setting up the spider contraption was fairly simple, Yap said. They inserted a needle into the parasoma chamber, keeping it steady with a dab of super glue. Then, on the other end of the needle, one of the lab’s test rigs or a handheld syringe delivered a minute amount of air to activate the legs almost instantly.

“It starts to experience some wear and tear as we get close to 1,000 cycles,” Preston said. “We think that’s related to issues with dehydration of the joints. We think we can overcome that by applying polymeric coatings.”

So, what's the point of all this?

“There are a lot of pick-and-place tasks we could look into, repetitive tasks like sorting or moving objects around at these small scales, and maybe even things like assembly of microelectronics,” Preston said.

Yap, who coined the process of turning the spiders into mechanical grippers as "necrobotics," added, “Another application could be deploying it to capture smaller insects in nature, because it’s inherently camouflaged."

Plus, Preston touted the sustainability necrobotics.

“Also, the spiders themselves are biodegradable,” Preston said. “So we're not introducing a big waste stream, which can be a problem with more traditional components.”

Preston and Yap said that they understand some people may be turned off or creeped out by something that sounds like it's straight out of a sci-fi book, but they want to reassure everyone that what they are doing does not count as reanimation.

“Despite looking like it might have come back to life, we’re certain that it’s inanimate, and we’re using it in this case strictly as a material derived from a once-living spider,” Preston said. “It’s providing us with something really useful.”

Graduate students Zhen Liu and Trevor Shimokusu and postdoctoral fellow Anoop Rajappan also coauthored the study.

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