From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.

Answering those questions that make you go,

um, um, um, um, um. I'm Mayniko Wilhelm. Have you ever seen a close-up picture of a spider's face? Not only do spiders have eight legs, most spiders have eight eyes too, and they look so cool. Some spider eyes are big, some are small, some detect color,

and some detect motion. But they all work together to help the spider find food, stay out of danger,

and know where to go. But you know what you've never seen in a close-up of a spider?

Ears! Our listener, Terilyn, from Yakima, Washington Washington wants to know what's up with that.

Do spiders have ears? Spiders don't have ears, but they can hear.

I'm Paul Shambal. I'm a biologist at Harvard University, and I study spiders, in particular,

how they move and how they perceive the world. So usually when we think of ears, you think of the things that you have, these big things that stick out on the side of your head. And it sort of matches when you think about a dog or a cat, they're sort of the same type of thing. But it turns out that there's a lot of different ways that you can have an ear. Cool examples are crickets have ears on their legs. Praying

mantis basically just has one big ear right down the middle of its body. So there's a lot of

different ways that you can make in here. Spiders are even more different though. They don't

have ears at all. But what they have is they're just covered in hairs. And some of those hairs

are sort of like dog hairs or like hairs on the top of your hairs. And some of those hairs are sort of like dog hairs

or like hairs on the top of your head.

But some of them are really, really special.

They're so special that when the air moves around the spider,

they can feel it.

And when you're hearing, what you're actually doing is you're listening to the wind.

You're listening to how the air moves.

Spiders can do that with these hairs.

That's how spiders hear, but they don't do it with ears.

They do it with hairs.

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