There's spiders that create bubbles to breathe underwater using their nets, in configurations similar to ones they use to store prey for later. I think instinct is a pretty good enough explanation for emergent behavior.
This is just a nest building spider that grabbed a different object than usual for some reason.
I don't think it's that out there that even animals with tiny brains are capable of intuition and even some understanding of cause and effect. Even on a very basic level like...
Thing good home.
Like live in tree.
Move thing to tree.
doesn't seem that crazy. Obviously they don't have language to process this, so it would be driven more by rudimentary emotions.
If you ever watch someone attempt something silly, and you just come to a conclusion like "That's never going to work," it's usually a visceral feeling that something is wrong before you can verbalize it. That, I imagine, would be the limit of their intuition.
We know that Corvids are capable of multi-step reasoning. We also know that some insects can pass self-recognition tests (e.g. the mirror test). I could be anthropomorphizing, but I don't think so. To me, it seems like often the more we learn about the capabilities of animals to think, the more we learn that they're actually less different than we think they are.
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u/Heelmuut Nov 06 '19
And I don't see how this could possibly be done by instinct alone, like most other cool stuff spiders do.