Spider Prey Localization by Web Vibration Triangulation

An orb-weaver spider never sees its prey arrive — it feels it. Sitting at the hub with each leg resting on a different radial thread, the spider reads the mechanical vibration that a struggling insect sends rippling through the silk and, within a fraction of a second, turns that pattern into a direction and a distance to strike. This simulator lets you strike the web anywhere and watch the resulting wave propagate outward from the impact point, decaying with distance the way real viscoelastic silk damps a signal, while an eight-leg sensor array at the hub reconstructs the source using the same two cues a real spider relies on: the relative amplitude each leg receives (strongest on the struck radius, weaker the further around the web a leg sits, because the sticky capture spiral couples vibration between radii far more poorly than the radii themselves) and the arrival time at the fastest leg, which sets the estimated distance through wave-speed × latency. Push up the background wind-noise slider and watch both the direction and distance estimates degrade — the same signal-detection problem a real spider faces when trying to tell an incoming meal from a gust of wind or falling debris.