Spiders Smell Using Their Legs, Research Finds [Video]

Most spiders have eight legs, no ears and use fine leg hairs connected to nerve cells or their webs to hear sounds in their environment. But how do they smell?

A new study by an international team of researchers has found that male spiders “smell” with their legs, using olfactory hairs — wall-pore sensilla — as their “nose” to detect sex pheromones released by females.

“Spiders have always lived alongside humans, so it’s surprising how much we still don’t know about them. One long-standing mystery was related to how spiders detect smells. Now, our latest research has finally uncovered the secret,” Dan-Dan Zhang, one of the study’s authors and a sensory biology researcher at Lund University, wrote in The Conversation.

Other contributors include Gabriele Uhl, a professor of general and systematic zoology at the University of Greifswald, and Hong-Lei Wang, also a sensory biology researcher at Lund.

The discovery came after a decade …