The X-pert Files: Duane Harland

Duane Harland

The dozen or so jumping spiders in a quarantine lab at Canterbury University have just become high earners - to the tune of $730,000 in fact. That's how much money Duane Harland, a researcher for South Island private company Canesis, and Canterbury University's Professor Robert Jackson have secured from the Government's Marsden Fund for research into the fly-sized creatures.

But they are interested only in one part of the spider (family salticidae, genus portia): its eyes, and how it assembles its view of the world.

Obscure, you might think. What's the point? Valid question, says Dr Harland, 31. "Why study spiders? Where is that going to get you? How is that going to get you a better job, or increase your wages by $2 an hour?"

Dr Harland, an animal behaviour researcher, explains it thus: "Most spiders have eight eyes but can't see well, relying on environmental cues like vibrations to make sense of their world. But two of the jumping spider's eight eyes can discern colour and shape. Also, unlike most spiders, and despite its tiny brain, this variety is clever - solving problems, making decisions and thinking ahead.

"Complex eye movement," says Dr Harland, "appears to be the key to unlocking the mystery of how something with a brain smaller than a pinhead can often perform at an almost mammalian level."

In the lab at Canterbury, the pair will use a computer to model the spider's eyes, the way they move, and the neural processes that control them.

Then, computer-created virtual spider eyes made from artificial neural networks will have to perform the same tasks as the live spiders, and artificial evolution will be used to create networks with the most spider-like solutions to tasks.

Dr Harland believes people can't always see that such apparently obscure research can bring great benefits; if New Zealand has an anti-intellectual streak, he says, it is because people can have difficulty ascribing worth to something that doesn't lead directly to financial or practical gain.

So let's speculate where spider vision research could go. It could eventually lead to the development of machines or robots that use vision-directed decision-making. Those robots or machines could then become part of, say, an unmanned, model-sized helicopter, which could fly off to search for people lost in the bush - its artificial vision capable of spotting human forms while avoiding trees and other obstacles.

Dr Harland and Professor Jackson start their research in April, after Professor Jackson returns from East Africa. He is currently in Kenya studying a mosquito, evarcha culicivora, which satisfies its craving for human blood by preying on blood-sucking mosquitoes - the only creature known to select its prey based on what that prey has eaten.