This bug is drugged. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

To be a scientist and researcher with lots of money and resources is a beautiful thing.

A thing that could further technological evolution change the way we live our lives,

maybe even save lives. But unfortunately not every experiment is going to be this

cathartic breakthrough. Sometimes you just give a lot of drugs to spiders and call it a day.

And that's what we're talking about on this episode. The notorious Peter N. Witt and NASA

studies of how well spiders perform their web spinning under copious amounts of drugs.

In 1948 Swiss zoologist H.M. Peters was studying the web patterns of garden spiders and was

fed up with his early grueling research schedule. The garden spiders he studied made their webs in an

inconvenient window between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. and Peters wanted his sleep schedule and sanity back.

That's when he made a request to his colleague from a collegeist Peter N. Witt.

Peters wanted Witt to help him shift the time garden spiders built their webs to something

a little bit earlier and less annoying. Apparently Witt didn't have much going on and was

up for the task. He decided that to change the schedule of the spiders he would use what most

humans use to stay awake and perform or to fall asleep early. Drugs. Witt dissolved in a ray of

different drugs into sugar water and to administer touched a drop of the sugar drug solution to

the spider's tiny little mouth. In later studies spiders were fed their drugs by way of flies who

also drugged. The webs were photographed for each spider before and after the drugging.

The drugs administered were psychoactive, ranging from endphetamines, mescaline,

stric9, lsd, and caffeine. And his findings? While dosing the poor garden spiders with drugs

didn't change when they built their webs, it did change the shape and structure of the webs

themselves in a way that was absolutely fascinating and a little unhinged. All the drugs made the

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