### id260586568 Portia spiders experiment > If these strategies don’t work on a particular web spider, another of *Portia*’s tricks is to shake the whole web so it moves as if a gust of wind had hit it. This acts as a smokescreen for the vibration *Portia* makes as it crawls into the target spider’s web. In laboratory experiments, Jackson found that *Portia* will try different plucking methods, speeds and patterns until it finds just the right combination to fool each individual web spider it hunts — essentially [learning on the job](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4535141). > > “Even amongst this surprisingly intelligent group, *Portia* stand out as being oddly brilliant,” Morehouse says. “They are, after all, hunting very dangerous prey, so caution and cleverness are useful tools.” - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fqd302nzjazg4nkr5185dv0x) - [[20 Information/26 Annotated/Spiders Are Much Smarter Than You Think by Betsy Mason#id260586568 Portia spiders experiment|View in Vault]]