Cover artwork by Leya Tess (featuring Habronattus altanus)
Summary
Spiders Song is a story about a quest to hear the greatest symphony on Earth: the music of evolution. Along the way, we get to know some of nature’s most surprising musicians — the paradise jumping spiders.
Part 1 is the Spiders.
Part 2 is the Song.
But there's more to this story than just 2 podcast episodes! We're also releasing an open-source system which may be used to hear evolutionary patterns as music.
As you'll hear in Part 2, data sonification, the sonic equivalent of data visualization, has found applications in many scientific fields, but never before in phylogenetics: the study of evolutionary relationships.
This sonification system is intended as an experimental platform for evolutionary biologists to explore and communicate their data through sound, and for musicians to take inspiration from biodiversity.
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Episode transcripts:
Funding for this episode was provided by the Canada Council for the Arts, but ongoing support for this podcast comes from listeners just like you. To keep this show going, join our community at patreon.com/futureecologies
Sonifying Phylogeny: The Music of Evolution
Can you hear the patterns of evolution? Data sonification, the sonic equivalent of data visualization, has found applications in many scientific fields, but never before in phylogenetics: the study of evolutionary relationships. This is the story of many related species expressed as music.
This example has been tailor made to a particular group of organisms: the paradise jumping spiders (genus Habronattus), but it is driven by a generative music system that may be adapted for any other tree of life: any group of species, or phylogenetic dataset. How did we make it? Click here for a tour of the Max/MSP patch and access to the source code.
Why jumping spiders? These amazingly diverse, small, and colourful creatures are an illustrative microcosm of evolutionary biodiversity itself. They are best known for their intricate songs and dances: courtship rituals in which they vibrate & pulse their bodies, while moving their other body parts in time. Like jazz standards, these spiders' songs include both predetermined and improvised passages. Songs vary widely across jumping spider species — with almost as much diversity as their appearances. Jumping spiders make up almost 1/6th of all spider species, but their songs and dances are mostly undocumented.
The data driving this sonification are a hypothesis of evolutionary history — estimating how species living today evolved from a single common ancestor and reconstructing the state of several characteristics. Each branching point indicates the moment where one lineage split into two. At that branching moment, the “voice” of the daughter lineage can be heard as a series of notes — a melody representing one path, or the other.
That melody is an arpeggiated chord of up to 4 notes, telling a story of 4 generations. Great-great-grandmother notes are forgotten, and daughter notes are added. Depending on the arbitrary “direction” of descendance, a daughter note may be either 10 semitones (a minor 7th) above her parent pitch, or 7 semitones (a perfect 5th) below, wrapping to a 4 octave range.
Thus, each lineage and therefore each unique species is conveyed by a unique melody.
NB. When the arpeggio is played, it is arranged into a particular pitch order, and pitches are quantized into a particular mode, so the intervals aren’t always precisely -7 st and +10 st.
To play this phylogeny, we trace the path from the root of the tree (last common ancestor) along two branches at a time; two voices in counterpoint, concluding at two leaves. After each cycle the melody always starts at the same place, the root, but eventually evolves into something new along the next pair of branches. Can you hear the point at which one melody splits into two?
But that’s just the shape of the tree! Besides pitch, the character of the sound itself is influenced by several other pieces of data: the convergent evolution of a Y sex chromosome (most male spiders don’t have those), and the separate convergent evolution of distal chiasmatic loci.
Neo-Y chromosomes can be heard several ways: they change the arpeggio order, and the scale mode, and prior to their arrival on the branch a triangle will ring. In one case, a Y chromosome evolves, and then disappears.
In this dataset, there are 4 discrete types of male sex chromosomes (karyotypes): X0, XX0, XXY, and XXXY. Each is given a different scale mode and arpeggio pattern, but those which include a Y chromosome always have an overall descending arpeggio.
The chiasmatic locus (where chromosomes cross and swap DNA during meiosis) may be high or low or anywhere in between. This continuous characteristic is described by the envelope of each note — whether it is short, sharp, and plucky, or long and sustained. Plucky envelopes correspond to the chiasma which are located closer to the tips of the chromosome
Can you hear a connection between the shorter, pluckier notes and the triangle / descending arpeggio pattern?
As spider lineages mutate and change, the timbre of their voice also changes in some proportion to evolutionary “distance”. These timbral changes are visually represented with a column of coloured dots — a sonic fingerprint for each voice. Changes may happen more drastically than you might expect! Evolution can sometimes be sudden (or it may be an artifact of how the data were processed).
If you’re wearing headphones, you might also notice that where the voices are positioned in stereo mimics their location on the tree, moving around your head as they follow their branches, and getting a little quieter as they go out towards the tips.
Finally, before each cycle of branch pairs, you will hear a sound reminiscent of a motorcycle. These are actual recordings of jumping spiders performing their songs. These spider songs have been processed through a synthesizer which models the physics of a plucked string, providing a drone bed for the entire piece — as though the spiders themselves were strumming.
Illustrations by Leya Tess
How it works: Max/MSP Patch
Get the source code on GitHub (GNU-GPLv3)
Show Notes and Credits
This episode was produced by Mendel Skulski, with help from Adam Huggins and so many others: thanks to Teresa Maddison, for first introducing us to Wayne’s story, and for helping us tell this one.
Wayne’s story can also be found in the form of his own 1-hour presentation “The Music of Evolution”
Thanks to Damien de Vienne, Miriam Quick, Duncan Geere, Simon Lysander Overstall, and Henri Boutin for collaborating on the sonification. And if you’re into this sort of thing, then you’ll love Duncan and Miriam’s podcast: Loud Numbers.
Our sonification was produced in Max/MSP, using phylogenetic data gathered by Dr. Wayne Maddison and Dr. Geneviève Leduc-Robert.
All of the jumping spider audio recordings you heard came courtesy of Dr. Damian Elias and his lab at UC Berkeley.
Music in Part 1 by Elisa Thorn, Curtis Andrews, Wes McLean, Patricia Wolf, Sunfish Moon Light, and Thumbug.
Sonification examples in Part 2 by Chris Chafe, NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida), Marc Evanstein, and Mark Temple
Additional music in Part 2 by Thumbug.
Special thanks to Ruby Singh, Vincent van Haaff, Teo Kaye, Erin Robinsong, Cait Hurley, Kieran Fanning, and to Lobe Spatial Sound Studio — Kate de Lorme, Hannah Acton, Ian Wyatt, Eric Chad, and Sev Shaban.
A huge thank you to Leya Tess for the amazing illustrations, and to Wayne Maddison for sharing his story.
Part 1 includes audio recorded by acclivity, mrmayo, Benboncan, Ferdinger, dorhel, 32cheeseman32, tyujik, AmeAngelofSin, petebuchwald, dwightsabeast, jgrzinich, Reitanna, 14FPanska_Nemec_Petr, moogy73, dersuperanton, javapimp, kyles, soundsofscienceupf, PeteBarry, szayelb, anderlk, cellokratzer, EminYILDIRIM, TRP, naturenotesuk, LadyImperatrix, lazymonk, adh.dreaming, and dawiddevill accessed through the Freesound Project, and protected by Creative Commons attribution licenses.
Funding for this episode was provided by the Canada Council for the Arts, but ongoing support for this podcast comes from listeners just like you — to keep this show going, join us at patreon.com/futureecologies
Citations
Bodner, M. R., Maddison, W.P. (2012) The biogeography and age of salticid spider radiations (Araneae: Salticidae). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 65 [1], pp. 213-240
Boutin, H., de Vienne, D. (2017) Sonification Of Phylogenetic Trees: Listening To Evolution. Journées d’Informatique Musicale (JIM) 2017, May 2017, Paris, France. ffhal-01893569f
Broder, E., Elias, D., Rodriguez, R., Rosenthal, G., Seymoure, B., Tinghitella, R. (2021) Evolutionary Novelty In Communication Between The Sexes. Biology Letters, 17 (2)
Charlesworth, D., Charlesworth, B. (1980) Sex differences in fitness and selection for centric fusions between sex-chromosomes and autosomes. Genet Res. 1980 Apr;35(2):205-14.
Chen, Y. K., Liao, C. P., Tsai, F. Y., Chi, K. J. (2013) More than a safety line: jump-stabilizing silk of salticids. J. R. Soc. Interface.10:20130572
Cushing, P. (2012) Spider-Ant Associations: An Updated Review of Myrmecomorphy, Myrmecophily, and Myrmecophagy in Spiders. Psyche: A Journal of Entomology (ed. Jean Paul Lachaud), 2012
Elias, D., Mason, A, Maddison, W, Hoy, R. (2003) Seismic signals in a courting male jumping spider (Araneae:Salticidae). J Exp Biol, 206 (22): 4029–4039.
Elias, D., Maddison, W, Peckmezia, C., Girard, M., Mason, A. (2012) Orchestrating the score: complex multimodal courtship in the Habronattus coecatus group of Habronattus jumping spiders (Araneae: Salticidae). Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 105, pp. 522–547.
Elias, D., Hebets, E., Hoy, R. (2006) Female Preference For Complex/Novel Signals in a Spider. Behavioral Ecology, 17(5), pp. 765–771,
Harland, D. P., Li, D., Jackson, R. R. (2012) How Jumping Spiders See the World, in Olga F. Lazareva, Toru Shimizu, and Edward A. Wasserman (eds), How Animals See the World: Comparative Behavior, Biology, and Evolution of Vision. Oxford Academic, online edn.
Maddison, W., Leduc-Robert, G. (2013) Multiple origins of sex chromosome fusions correlated with chiasma localization in Habronattus jumping spiders (Araneae: Salticidae). Evolution; 67(8), pp. 2258-72.
Masta, S., Maddison, W. (2002) Sexual Selection Driving Diversification In Jumping Spiders. PNAS, 99 (7), pp. 4442-4447
Taylor, L., Amin, A., Maier, E., Byrne, K., Morehouse, N. (2016) Flexible color learning in an invertebrate predator: Habronattus jumping spiders can learn to prefer or avoid red during foraging. Behavioral Ecology, 2016; 27 (2), p. 520
White, M. (1950) Some General Problems of Chromosomal Evolution and Speciation in Animals. Survey of Biological Progress (3) 1957, pp 109-147
Zurek, D., Cronin, T., Taylor, L., Byrne, K., Sullivan, M., Morehouse, N. (2015) Spectral filtering enables trichromatic vision in colorful jumping spiders. Current Biology, 25, 10, pp. R403-R404.
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Part 1 Transcription
Introduction Voiceover 00:03
You are listening to season five of Future Ecologies
Adam Huggins 00:13
Are we… are we going? We're rolling?
Mendel Skulski 00:15
We're back.
Adam Huggins 00:16
This is the second windowless room I've been trapped in today.
Mendel Skulski 00:20
The things we sacrifice for sound.
Adam Huggins 00:22
It's true. What's up Mendel? Why are we what are we doing here?
Mendel Skulski 00:26
Well, Adam, I want to tell you a story that's really special to me. It's something I've been working on quietly since mid 2019. Basically, right after season one.
Adam Huggins 00:42
Okay, so this is, this is a long gestational process here, even by our standards, which are slow.
Mendel Skulski 00:49
Yeah. I, so I don't know if you actually remember this, but right after we put out season one, we got an email. It was a criticism of our third episode, The Loneliest Plants, basically saying that we'd oversimplified the concept of biodiversity.
Adam Huggins 01:09
How does one not oversimplify the concept of biodiversity? But I do remember that email actually, didn't I respond to them?
Mendel Skulski 01:17
Yeah, you went back and forth about genetic diversity versus species diversity. But for me, things didn't end in that email thread. Because I got the chance to sit down with the scientist who wrote to us.
Wayne Maddison 01:33
I think that who I think I am is not quite who people know me as, or at least a lot of people know me as.
Mendel Skulski 01:39
So this is Wayne Madison. And people tend to know him as an evolutionary biologist.
Wayne Maddison 01:46
The work that I've done in evolutionary biology that's had the broadest reach is actually the computational side. It's the analytical tools that computer programs that help people analyze their data, because, of course, tools that help them do that really get a lot of traction in the field. And so a lot of people know me for that.
Mendel Skulski 02:06
So Wayne, along with his brother, David, they developed software which is now widely used to understand the tree of life, or Phylogenetics.
Adam Huggins 02:17
Phylogenetics being... like the science of how a group of organisms is related to one another.
Mendel Skulski 02:25
Exactly.
Adam Huggins 02:26
Their evolutionary branching patterns... that connect them — that connect us all.
Mendel Skulski 02:31
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 02:32
I'm not an evolutionary biologist. But I do know that
Mendel Skulski 02:35
So you probably have never had to create a Nexus file or used a program called Mesquite.
Adam Huggins 02:42
No Nexus is for crossing the border, and Mesquite is a tree from the southwest. As far as I know,
Mendel Skulski 02:50
In this context, Nexus and Mesquite are to phylogenetics kind of what the mp3 and iTunes are to music.
Wayne Maddison 02:58
Yeah, that's a good way to think about it.
Mendel Skulski 03:00
And Wayne is the co author of both.
Adam Huggins 03:04
Oh wow.
Mendel Skulski 03:05
But that's not actually the work he's most proud of,
Wayne Maddison 03:08
The one thing that I'm the most proud of — and that I think will last the longest, as in hundreds of years — is actually my work as a taxonomist
Adam Huggins 03:19
Taxonomy. Okay, so we've started with phylogeny, now we're to taxonomy. But it's the taxonomists who put together phylogenies, right? They're the ones who figure it out and name all the things. And then sometimes very frustratingly, also changed the names of things that you got used to knowing as one name, and now they're something else... and then sometimes they change it back.
Mendel Skulski 03:39
Yeah, right. Taxonomists are the people who literally make up the names. And more importantly, they describe and illustrate exactly what makes one species different from another.
Adam Huggins 03:52
And I'd never be able to identify all of these obscure grasses without them.
Mendel Skulski 03:58
So way back then, I heard a story from Wayne, and it kind of changed my life. You know, looking back, I can say that it made me the person who I am today.
Adam Huggins 04:12
And who is that person, Mendel?
Mendel Skulski 04:16
In a word, I am now a musician.
Adam Huggins 04:21
You are. It's awesome. I'm so excited that we can make music together for this podcast.
Mendel Skulski 04:26
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 04:26
And yeah, I guess I hadn't thought too much about how or why you got there. It just sort of happened organically, from my perspective. Is this like your alter ego origin story? Is this the the genesis of Thumbug that we're talking about here?
Mendel Skulski 04:43
You might call it the hatching.
Adam Huggins 04:45
The hatching... that... that sounds very organic.
Mendel Skulski 04:48
Yeah. But you know that that's really just a tiny part of it. Because to tell that story, first, I need to tell you Wayne's. And it starts with the moment that put him on his path.
Mendel Skulski 05:06
It's a story of divergence and convergence; melody and rhythm; pattern and endless variation.
Mendel Skulski 05:19
From Future Ecologies, this is Spiders Song, Part One.
05:29
Broadcasting from the uceded, shared and asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies: exploring the shape of our world through ecology, design, and sound.
Mendel Skulski 06:13
Our story begins in 1970, when Wayne was 12 years old.
Wayne Maddison 06:20
Burned into my memory is this one day. We were in the Rocky Mountains, my family, my brother and I.
Mendel Skulski 06:27
They were on a trip through Kicking Horse pass
Wayne Maddison 06:30
Not too far from the border between Alberta and British Columbia, just traveling through the mountains.
Mendel Skulski 06:35
While they were there, Wayne found himself at the headwaters of a small mountain stream
Wayne Maddison 06:41
That has a really peculiar thing happening to it, or at least it was really peculiar to me as a 12 year old. You follow the little creek along, it's going downstream. And at one point, there's this pile of rocks there, and the stream splits in two.
Mendel Skulski 06:57
One side flowing to the west, the other to the east.
Wayne Maddison 07:01
It's not like a normal stream that you think about where you have tributaries that come together. This was a case where it split. And there's a little plaque there, and the plaque explained
Mendel Skulski 07:09
That this stream was positioned precisely on top of the great continental divide. From this point of divergence, the two halves of this creek would end in different oceans.
Wayne Maddison 07:23
The left half of the split continues, eventually joining other creeks becoming rivers and going to the Pacific Ocean. The right half continued down the other side, into Alberta, and eventually going to the Arctic Ocean. And I remember looking at that, and thinking, "Whoa, just imagine the water is coming, and two little bits of water that are just a millimeter apart, strike this pile of rocks, and the one little bit happens to bounce to the Pacific. And the other little bit happens to bounce to the right and ends up in the Arctic Ocean. And these two little bits of water from being right next to each other, suddenly find that they have such different destinies."
Mendel Skulski 08:07
So this place was called Divide Creek.
Wayne Maddison 08:12
And, of course, I realized that life is full of Divide Creek moments. Every one of us has these moments when some little different decision that you could have thought of, or some little different bit of chance that might have encountered you could have led you on a completely different path in your life.
Mendel Skulski 08:29
One such moment would come for Wayne the very next year, on the shores of Lake Ontario.
Wayne Maddison 08:38
And as we were there on the shore, a mat of grass floated by — presumably some nearby house or something had mowed their lawn and thrown it onto the lake. We we didn't compost back in those days. And on that mat of grass floating by was a spider. She was a fairly small spider as spiders go. But she looked up at me. And it was the fact that she looked up at me that was I think the thing that I noticed so much, because I'm not used to little things in the world paying attention to me. I imagine now that my eyes twinkled when she looked up at me. I don't think her eyes twinkled, but it was a real special moment.
Mendel Skulski 09:24
She was about as cute as a spider can be. Tiny in almost every way, except for a big pair of eyes.
Wayne Maddison 09:34
So of course, not only did she look up at me, but she was looking around at things in general. Like when I had her on my hand she looked around.
Mendel Skulski 09:42
She would tilt her whole body to look at different things. Clearly paying attention to the world around her
Wayne Maddison 09:50
With how she looked around, with obviously her really good vision, she felt more like a little cat than like a spider.
Wayne Maddison 10:00
You know, at that moment I felt connected to her as individuals. It was a connection about a common way of seeing the world. But as I became a biologist, and I learned more about evolution, I came to understand that we were connected, of course, by more than that — because we're all part of the same evolutionary tree. We are relatives. And so there must have been a moment, which we now think is maybe about 600 million years ago, where there was an ancestor common to both of us.
Mendel Skulski 10:38
That is to say that once upon a time, the ancestor of Wayne and the ancestor of this tiny spider were siblings — both part of a population of ancient animals, probably small, bilaterally, symmetrical wormy things living in the ocean, when something happened, that caused that one population to split into two.
Wayne Maddison 11:04
That was a Divide Creek moment. So that for whatever reason, one of the subpopulations became isolated, and it evolved and changed. And eventually it diversified into many, many thousands, and in fact millions of different species, including snails, and insects, and spiders, and so forth, and including, therefore, the spider that was on my hand then. And going back to that ancestral worm, the other population that split off from it, starting at the beginning, looking almost exactly the same ended up evolving and diversifying into many thousands of things, including humans, including me.
Mendel Skulski 11:48
And so he kept this spider as a pet, and fell in love. And of course, as a budding taxonomist, the first order of business was to give her a name.
Wayne Maddison 12:01
So I had to first of all figure out what she was, in terms of human names, what species. So I went, and I looked in a bookstore. They had the little golden nature guides, and there she was Phidippus audax. That was her species. But because her name was Phidippus audax, her species name, I called her Phiddy. So she was Phiddy.
Mendel Skulski 12:21
Audax, a species in the genus Phidippus, in the family Salticidae — a family of tiny arachnids, also known as jumping spiders.
Wayne Maddison 12:35
The rest of that summer, I started noticing jumping spiders on houses, on bushes, on fences on trees, and I realized that there were lots of different species.
Mendel Skulski 12:47
They were all recognizably related.
Wayne Maddison 12:49
They all shared these great big eyes, they all reacted to the world like a cat. And yet,
Mendel Skulski 12:55
They were also radically different from each other. With all sorts of spectacularly weird shapes and colors.
Wayne Maddison 13:03
Some of them were small and striped, some of them had metallic pink rear ends, some of them had green bits, some of them are longer and thinner, and so forth. It was an incredible diversity, all of them being jumping spiders, all of them having this behavior.
Adam Huggins 13:19
So you you said that they come in all different shapes and colors, but um, do they also come in all different sizes?
Mendel Skulski 13:28
No, basically, as a rule, no jumping spider is very big. And they're all harmless to humans. You know, most wouldn't even be half as wide as your pinky nail.
Adam Huggins 13:39
Got it. Okay, these are not not huge spiders.
Mendel Skulski 13:42
Yeah, they're teeny tiny.
Wayne Maddison 13:46
One of the things that I learned that summer was that you don't have to go to exotic tropical places to find absolutely gorgeous, spectacularly beautiful biodiversity. Here in Vancouver on the beaches, There's this one species, Habronattus americanus, that the males have these bright red pom poms. And the face is this metallic mauve color. Absolutely spectacular. They're so beautiful. And yet no one knows that they're there because they're only half a centimeter long. If they were birds, Vancouver would be famous for them.
Wayne Maddison 14:21
In a way, a lot of my career has been driven by this fascination by biodiversity, and wanting to see all of the ways there are for a jumping spider to be.
Mendel Skulski 14:33
And as it turns out, jumping spiders — of which Phidippus and Habronattus are just two subgroup — this is the most diverse family of spiders on the planet at around 6000 described species that accounts for nearly 15% of all spiders.
Adam Huggins 14:53
Oh, wow. That's a lot of spiders. Good thing they're small.
Mendel Skulski 14:56
Yeah. And this is the group that Wayne focuses on as a taxonomist, so we're going to spend the rest of this episode talking about biodiversity in general by talking about jumping spiders in detail, because they're just an amazingly illustrative microcosm of evolution itself.
Adam Huggins 15:16
Okay, okay, we have these colorful, beautiful charismatic divers, but very small spiders that make up a fairly significant proportion of all spiders. But just backing up for a sec, jumping spiders...?
Wayne Maddison 15:31
They are called jumping spiders because they jump. So I tend to think of their eyes as being their most distinctive feature. But their jumping is used in combination with their eyes for their prey capture behavior. They don't build a web to catch prey.
Adam Huggins 15:46
Wait, what is a spider if it doesn't build a web? Do they still spin silk?
Wayne Maddison 15:50
So they use their silk for little cocoons that they sleep in. They use silk to wrap their egg masses. They use silk as these little draglines that they carry behind them, sort of like a rock climber, in case they fall. So they see very well, they sneak up on things, and then they pounce using a really well executed jump.
Adam Huggins 16:12
Oh, they really are like little cats, aren't they?
Mendel Skulski 16:15
Yeah, you know, in in a number of ways, actually. For example, those two big front facing eyes — thanks to those jumping spider vision is even sharper than a cat's.
Wayne Maddison 16:26
Which is pretty incredible for something that small, because they're running against the physical limits of how small the pixels can be, so to speak, and still get enough light to detect the signal.
Mendel Skulski 16:39
But there's at least one major distinction between cats and spiders.
Adam Huggins 16:45
Like... like besides the number of legs?
Mendel Skulski 16:47
Yeah. And that's how they jump. Cats basically jump in the same way that we do with muscles moving bone and joints to push off of the ground. But jumping spiders don't have big muscley legs.
Adam Huggins 17:02
Right? How does it... how does it work?
Wayne Maddison 17:04
It turns out that the power for the jumping doesn't come from the legs themselves. The power from the jumping comes from blood pressure rising quickly and squirting into the legs and propelling the leg straight.
Mendel Skulski 17:17
The powerful muscles that allow these spiders to jump aren't in their legs, but in their heads.
Wayne Maddison 17:24
And so it's actually a hydraulic jumping mechanism that they use.
Mendel Skulski 17:28
So in order to jump, they clench the muscles in their head, push a bunch of blood into their legs, and off they go,
Wayne Maddison 17:36
They can jump quite precisely. They are known to be able to jump and nab flies flying by. So they can nab flies out of the out of the air.
Mendel Skulski 17:50
But remember, these guys are teeny tiny.
Wayne Maddison 17:54
The furthest they can jump that I've ever seen is maybe about 25 centimeters. And that's an Olympic jumping spider jump.
Mendel Skulski 18:04
Usually their jumps are just a few centimeters.
Wayne Maddison 18:07
Little hops.
Mendel Skulski 18:08
But that precise control also allows them to do more than just jump. They sing, and they dance.
Adam Huggins 18:17
You're joking.
Wayne Maddison 18:21
This amazing vision is not just used by the spiders in catching prey, but it's also an opportunity for them to communicate with one another.
Wayne Maddison 18:32
The beautiful colors of these males and the complex ornaments are used in these courtship dances — where the males display in front of the females and the females use their excellent vision to watch the males. In some species of jumping spiders, like the one that Phiddy belongs to, the courtship behavior is pretty simple. The males just stick the front legs out and wiggle them around and sort of dance side to side a little bit. And it's not much more than that. But in other species, it's incredibly complicated! So complicated as to almost defy description.
Mendel Skulski 19:09
So just for a couple of examples, jumping spiders have dance moves like the tick-rev and the foreleg wave.
Adam Huggins 19:17
Oh, these have been named.
Mendel Skulski 19:18
Yeah. Well, Wayne and his colleagues named them.
Adam Huggins 19:20
Oh, got it.
Mendel Skulski 19:21
Do you want to try them with me?
Adam Huggins 19:22
I would love to try them with you.
Mendel Skulski 19:24
Okay, so we're going to do the tick-rev. So bring both your front legs forward, up and over your head.
Adam Huggins 19:31
You mean my... you're talking about my arms?
Mendel Skulski 19:33
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 19:33
Okay.
Mendel Skulski 19:34
Okay. Now bring your wrists down, so your hands point forward.
Adam Huggins 19:37
Yes.
Mendel Skulski 19:38
Now, pop your hands up. That's the tick. Tick!
Adam Huggins 19:42
Tick!
Mendel Skulski 19:42
Now, flap them forward, up and down as fast as you can. That's the rev.
Mendel Skulski 19:47
Revvvvvvvvv
Mendel Skulski 19:47
Revvvvvv
Adam Huggins 19:51
I think I've done this in aerobics class before.
Mendel Skulski 19:55
All right. All right. One more time. Tick!
Adam Huggins 19:57
Tick!
Mendel Skulski 19:58
Revvvvvvv
Adam Huggins 19:58
Revvvvvvvvvvv
Mendel Skulski 19:59
Tick!
Adam Huggins 20:00
Tick!
Mendel Skulski 20:01
Revvvv
Adam Huggins 20:01
Revvvvvvv. Aaaaa I love it.
Mendel Skulski 20:05
I'm glad. So let's keep it going and we're going to do the foreleg wave. Bring your arms down a little.
Adam Huggins 20:11
Okay.
Mendel Skulski 20:11
Keeping your hands pointing forward.
Adam Huggins 20:13
Okay.
Mendel Skulski 20:13
But instead of ticking and revving, wave your hands in circles from the wrist.
Adam Huggins 20:19
Which... which direction do I wave my hands in here? Do I wave them together or opposite directions?
Mendel Skulski 20:25
Well, different spiders have different dances. So whatever feels right.
Wayne Maddison 20:31
There's almost as much variation among jumping spider species in their dances as there is among their appearances. Of course, they've got eight legs, they've got these palpae up front, and they've got an abdomen. And so there are lots of things that they can wiggle and move. So they'll rotate their little pelvis in little circles. They'll flick the front legs, they'll shuffle the third legs, they'll be moving the abdomen up and down. And so all these different body parts can be moving in different times and different sequences in different ways. And if you think you get confused, when you try to do the Macarena, just be thankful you're not trying to do these jumping spider dances because it's much, much more complicated.
Mendel Skulski 21:13
And these tiny, intricate dances are taking place all around us all the time.
Wayne Maddison 21:19
This is happening in people's backyards all across North America. Like they're just these little birds of paradise that are hopping around people's backyards.
Adam Huggins 21:41
Okay, so they dance. And you also said that... that they sing?
Mendel Skulski 21:49
In a manner of speaking, they vibrate.
Adam Huggins 22:12
It almost sounds like a cat purring
Mendel Skulski 22:14
Yeah, or a motorcycle.
Adam Huggins 22:17
If a cat was a motorcycle!
Wayne Maddison 22:21
That clicking is not actually being done by the first legs, even though it looks like it might be. The first leg simply are synchronized with the part of the body that is making a noise, which is the abdomen. The way that his abdomen is making that noise is a combination of stridulation — so he's rubbing the front of the abdomen against the back of the carapace — but a lot of the noise is coming just from the inertia of the flicks of the abdomen, being transmitted through the body, through the legs and so that it's he's basically making his feet pulse up and down against the substrate. So these displays are better thought of as not as acoustic, but seismic.
Mendel Skulski 23:10
And because of that, you can't really hear these songs with your naked ears, which also makes them really hard to document. Instead of a microphone, these recordings were made with a laser that measures changes in the surface deflection of whatever the spider is standing on.
Wayne Maddison 23:26
So jumping spiders don't really have great ears in terms of anything that would hear through the air. And primarily, they sense vibrations through the ground, so that they're feeling the ground shaking by how it affects their legs.
Mendel Skulski 23:42
And despite accounting for nearly 1/6 of all spider species, jumping spider songs are almost completely undocumented. When people have heard about jumping spiders, they usually know about the dances, but almost never about the songs. Both the songs and the dances are part of the same courtship performance. Each dance motif is paired with a pattern of vibrations. And it would be really easy to assume that they were making the sound directly by moving their legs, but they're really just amazingly well synchronized.
Adam Huggins 24:20
That's so wild.
Mendel Skulski 24:21
And you could say the songs are pre-programmed. The structure of them is pretty consistent between performances. And they're similar between closely related species. But there's evidence that female jumping spiders prefer... novelty! They respond better to a song and a dance that they haven't seen a million times before.
Adam Huggins 24:44
Yeah they're just like us.
Mendel Skulski 24:46
In some ways. One thing I think it's particularly amazing is that in the most complex performances, there are certain sections where individual spiders will apparently improvise — almost as if they're covering a jazz standard.
Wayne Maddison 25:04
Within a group of say 5, 10, 20 species, they're all playing basically the same genre — they're all playing jazz, basically, right in a particular genre of jazz. But they'll use the elements with different numbers of repetitions, or maybe a little extra note in there or something like that. But it's the same basic thing. Whereas the next group over will be big band.
Mendel Skulski 25:30
And when jumping spiders evolve to be showy, they really go all out.
Wayne Maddison 25:36
So the most complicated colors and ornaments are held by the species that have the most complicated movements, and the most complicated songs.
Mendel Skulski 25:47
The ones with the most complex songs can perform for over an hour! And again, we're talking about a spider that might just be the size of a pea. So while we don't see a huge amount of creativity across individual spiders,
Wayne Maddison 26:02
the creativity comes at the evolutionary level, as natural selection generates new variants of the displays. And so there is creativity in the system, but it's more at the broad level across millions of years among species, and not at the actual individual spiders inventing new little songs.
Mendel Skulski 26:21
But when we step back to observe the group of species...
Wayne Maddison 26:25
The fact that the lineages that are doing this, that are holding these patterns are also beautiful, each in their own way, that each has this amazing set of structures and colors, and behaviors and noises and everything,
Mendel Skulski 26:38
You might say, nature's creativity,
Wayne Maddison 26:41
It's just stunning.
Wayne Maddison 26:49
Pretty early on, as I was getting into jumping spiders, I started drawing them. And for me, it was not only just an expression of an artistic side that I've always had, but it was also a way for me to celebrate these organisms that I just thought were so cool. Eventually, that turned into biological illustrations for the sake of documenting the differences among all these species. And I, of course, I built up a bigger and bigger library of all these drawings. And I remember at some point, as I was putting these together into a single big illustration representing the diversity for a publication, that I could see all these little parts of the spiders that I had drawn, and they were all arrayed like that. And it suddenly struck me that the spider bits had sort of patterns to them, there was a sense to them.
Mendel Skulski 27:39
That is, although they were very different, there was something in those differences that was recognizable.
Wayne Maddison 27:47
You know, maybe it's easier to think about it was something that people know, like an orchid or something like that, like you look at an ark and you say, oh, that's an orchid, right? And you can look at a different species of orchid. And it's like, oh, it's clearly an orchid, but it's different, right? And you get to see what you can compare. Oh, that's that bit. That's that bit. But you can see how those bits differ. And so you start to notice that this is variations on a theme. And that variation, as you look across species starts to feel like a little bit like a dance. It's obviously a very different dance from the dance at the spiders do in their lifetime.
Mendel Skulski 28:25
But this evolutionary dance is more than just endless variation. Because sometimes creeks divide, and then later reunite. That's after the break.
Wayne Maddison 29:07
You know, these Divide Creek moments in evolution where a lineage splits in two, and then each diversifies. You look at one of the points, of jumping spiders, and another point, humans — we're so different in so many ways. You might think, "Oh my gosh, evolution is just all this chaotic diversification." And then you look within jumping spiders and how much diversity there is in jumping spider dances "Oh my gosh, it's just constantly diverging, everything's different from everything else." And yet at the same time, as you're getting this divergence, many of them are also finding common solutions.
Mendel Skulski 29:40
So understanding the dance of evolution isn't just about appreciating variation. Sometimes organisms will each take different evolutionary journeys, and still end up in a remarkably similar place. In a word, they converge.
Adam Huggins 29:58
Right. Convergent evolution.
Mendel Skulski 30:00
Right, yeah. And maybe you've heard that there's kind of a meme about how all sorts of animals keep evolving into crabs.
Adam Huggins 30:07
It has been brought to my attention, Mendel, that we are all heading inevitably towards crab.
Mendel Skulski 30:14
Crabs have happened at least five separate times now. So to kind of build on our metaphor of Divide Creek, we've got these two blobs of water, they hit a rock in a stream, go their separate ways and find themselves in different oceans on opposite sides of the planet. Then maybe eons later, subject to the wind and the whims of the currents. They are eventually reunited.
Adam Huggins 30:43
And eventually, both of them will be crabs.
Mendel Skulski 30:48
Yeah, maybe.
Adam Huggins 30:50
Am I following?
Mendel Skulski 30:51
Yeah, yeah, but, but in jumping spiders, you can see a whole set of really vivid convergences. For example, depending on where certain species live, you know, either mostly on tree trunks or in vegetation. They'll take on certain typical body forms.
Adam Huggins 31:10
Sure.
Mendel Skulski 31:11
But there's also apparently a really strong pressure for a jumping spider to pretend to be an ant! 14 different genera of jumping spiders from all around the world, separately evolved into near perfect ant mimics. Their bodies become long and skinny. And sometimes they grow whole fake heads and eyes, or they'll wave their forelegs around like antenna.
Adam Huggins 31:37
You're saying that while the rest of us may be on an inexorable trend towards crab, jumping spiders are headed towards ant.
Mendel Skulski 31:46
Yeah, some of them, at least. And this ant mimicry has happened over and over across jumping spider evolution. But it doesn't stop there. Some jumping spiders have independently evolved color vision.
Wayne Maddison 32:01
Jumping spiders can see color, but in a limited way for most species.
Mendel Skulski 32:06
So most spiders can only see green and ultraviolet light
Wayne Maddison 32:11
Sort of the equivalent of a human being colorblind. There are though some jumping spiders that have evolved a color vision probably as rich as ours.
Mendel Skulski 32:19
What's really incredible is that they've accomplished this in different ways.
Wayne Maddison 32:23
But only in a few groups. One of them is Habronattus, a group that I've looked at a lot.
Mendel Skulski 32:29
Habronattus is a mostly North American genus, also known as the paradise jumping spiders, many species of which have red ornaments on their legs or their faces, despite the fact that they have exactly zero photoreceptors sensitive to the color red.
Wayne Maddison 32:48
But instead, they've sort of hacked their green photoreceptors in a way to be able to see red by putting a red filter over some subset of those green photoreceptors. On the other hand, some other groups of jumping spiders have a different solution to a richer color vision. And so the peacock spiders, genus Maratus have instead done it in sort of the more traditional way to add colors, which is to add extra sensitive photoreceptors.
Adam Huggins 33:15
Incredible.
Mendel Skulski 33:16
And remember how you asked which way to wave your hands while we were doing the spider dances?
Adam Huggins 33:21
Yeah?
Mendel Skulski 33:22
There there are actually convergences there as well. Several different lineages of spiders have independently evolved asymmetrical dance moves, despite theories that sexual selection favors symmetry.
Adam Huggins 33:37
Are the ones like in the southern hemisphere, like they go one way and the ones in the northern hemisphere go the other way?
Mendel Skulski 33:43
I don't think so.
Adam Huggins 33:44
Has anyone checked?
Mendel Skulski 33:45
Probably not? That's a PhD right there. But speaking of sexual selection, it could be that many of these other evolutionary patterns, especially the ones that seem to be important for these courtship rituals, are connected to another convergence. Just one that's a little harder to see...
Wayne Maddison 34:13
Their sex chromosomes.
Mendel Skulski 34:14
Their sex chromosomes. Stay with me here.
Adam Huggins 34:17
Well, you said the word sex, and then you said the word chromosomes, so I'm torn. I hate to admit it, but my, my cellular bio is a little rusty.
Mendel Skulski 34:27
Well, if I may?
Adam Huggins 34:29
By all means,
Mendel Skulski 34:30
In your body, inside the nucleus of every cell, you've got a copy of your DNA, and that DNA is tightly coiled up and split into separate chunks. Those chunks are your chromosomes.
Adam Huggins 34:42
Okay, yeah, I can keep up with this.
Mendel Skulski 34:44
Each chromosome is part of a matched pair, half your chromosomes are from one parent, half her from the other.
Adam Huggins 34:50
I'm with you.
Mendel Skulski 34:51
The overall set of chromosomes is shared by every member of your species, except for the sex chromosomes, which occur in two different forms so called X and Y. Without getting into gender, which is a subjective experience slash social construction, or the spectrum of genetic exceptions to this binary, sex chromosomes in mammals, humans included, are typically an XX pair in females, and typically an XY pair in males.
Adam Huggins 35:20
Yeah, the X chromosomes, which are the nice long, fully formed ones, and then the Y one, which is like the runty little fragment of a chromosome.
Mendel Skulski 35:29
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 35:29
Okay. This I understand — humans, XX, XY. That's us. What about the jumping spiders?
Wayne Maddison 35:38
Well, most spiders, you can think of it as being a little bit the same. I mean, obviously, the the basic idea of having chromosomes it's the same as with mammals. The way it works in mammals is that that Y chromosome typically doesn't do a lot. And so you could almost dispense with it, right? You could always imagine the few functions it does, they move somewhere else. And then you've just got the X all by itself. In which case, if you were to dispense with it, you could make something where the males have only 1 X, and they don't have the Y anymore, and the females have their two Xs, and maybe that system could work.
Wayne Maddison 36:13
And in fact, that's what exactly spiders do. And so some of them have a single X in the male and two Xs in the female, others do a little duplication thing. So they've got two Xs in the male and four Xs in the female. But one way or another, it's just about how many Xs you have.
Wayne Maddison 36:33
This arrangement of sex chromosomes, in spiders in general, and in jumping spiders, in particular, it's actually generally pretty constant. Most species are like this. But every so often, you find a group of spiders, where are they suddenly do something different. And that's the way it is in Habronattus. In Habronattus, it's clear that their ancestors had this two Xs male, four Xs female system, but a number of them have evolved something else where they have either two or three Xs and a Y chromosome! This Y chromosome has evolved in Habronattus at least eight times in different lineages, possibly as many as 15 times.
Mendel Skulski 37:17
Within just this one genus of Habronattus, there are four different versions of male sex chromosomes — from a single X up to three X and a Y.
Adam Huggins 37:26
Okay, I get it sex chromosomes are weird. But what's the relationship between this and all the other convergences we were talking about?
Mendel Skulski 37:34
Okay, so I, I want to preface that that this part is theoretical, and doesn't necessarily apply to mammals and humans. But it could boil down to a sexual conflict between the different versions of certain genes.
Adam Huggins 37:49
What do you mean by that?
Wayne Maddison 37:50
So males and females are really different in all these regards. And as each of these features of males and females were evolving, there's a really good chance that there was a time, a moment when the feature that was appropriate for one sex was coming in, and it might have been a problem for the other sex.
Wayne Maddison 37:50
Of course, when we're talking about these courtship features, the dances and the ornaments and songs and so forth, males and females are different in these — males have them, females don't. What the females have instead is probably this whole array of invisible preferences that we can't see, right? So they've got their own things, but they're harder to see.
Wayne Maddison 38:28
So you could think of an example, for instance, where a mutation happens that would generate a red face. If the little males could think about it, which they don't, they would say "woohoo! I get to have a red face," right? And the females would say "oh, my gosh, I don't want a red face, I don't want to be so visible to predators." So that red face could be advantageous in males and disadvantageous females.
Wayne Maddison 38:52
But if there was then at that point the change in chromosome organization that generates the Y chromosome, it turns out that the variant that's good for males could be isolated to the Y chromosome, and the variant that is good for females could stay on what will then become the X. And that can allow the males to have a red face and the females to have a white face. And so it resolves that conflict. And that means that that chromosome change can be selected for — it can be advantageous, it can spread. And thus the species acquires this Y chromosome. because it was a useful thing to resolve this conflict between the interests of the males and the interest of the females.
Adam Huggins 39:39
So a Y chromosome could be a way for the spiders to develop sexual dimorphism. And that would give you colorful dancing males and less colorful but highly discerning females, just like you see in many birds.
Mendel Skulski 39:55
No, not exactly. There are lots of sexually dimorphic jumping spiders that don't have a Y chromosome. In fact, it's actually really interesting here, because it's the exception, not the rule.
Wayne Maddison 40:11
So for what it's worth, it turns out that when you look at the data for animals, there is only one other case that seems to have even close to this density of Y chromosome evolutions. It's some lizard case. But it's like this is like hugely rare to have this many origins in a small phylogenetic space.
Mendel Skulski 40:30
But this mechanism could play a part in reinforcing the especially strong dimorphism that we do see in certain genera, like Habronattus.
Wayne Maddison 40:39
One of the hints, even though we don't have really good data, that this is what's happening in this group — when you look in Habronattus, those groups of species that have the most complex courtship dances are in fact those that seem to have evolved the Y chromosome most often.
Wayne Maddison 40:56
And the spectacular thing is when you see convergence, as you do with jumping spider dances, and chromosomes and so forth, is that you start to realize that there are certain repeated patterns. And those repeated patterns show up in one lineage, they show up in another lineage, they show up in another lineage. And there might have been a certain sequence in each case. When you start to think about it like that, and think about these changes through time, in consistent sequences full of counterpoint and harmony, you start to feel as if each one of these lineages is an instrument, and that all of these branching lineages of evolution, therefore, are just like this giant orchestra playing this most amazing symphony.
Mendel Skulski 41:41
And like a symphony, evolution isn't completely random. But it also isn't completely predictable. There are similar evolutionary sequences, motifs and melodies that come again and again. There's harmony, rhythm, repetition. And yet, there are surprises everywhere. To Wayne, this was a shift in perspective not unlike looking up at the stars at night, and realizing that the Milky Way isn't just a dusty stripe across the sky, but it's something gigantic, that we're all inside of.
Mendel Skulski 42:33
And after a while of feeling this way — of imagining this grand symphony — Wayne got to thinking...
Wayne Maddison 42:42
What if somehow I could hear it?
Mendel Skulski 42:45
That's coming up in part two.
Mendel Skulski 43:08
Music in this episode was produced by Elisa Thorne, Curtis Andrews, West McClean, Patricia Wolf, Sunfish, Moon Light, and me, Thumbug. All the jumping spider audio recordings you heard came courtesy of Dr. Damian Elias and his lab at UC Berkeley. This series of Future Ecologies was produced by me, Mendel Skulski, with help from my co-host, Adam Huggins and our guest, Wayne Maddison. Special thanks to Teresa Madidson for first introducing me to Wayne's story, and for helping us tell this one. And thanks to Leya Tess for the amazing cover art.
Mendel Skulski 44:00
You can hear Part Two right now. Follow Future Ecologies wherever you get your podcasts, or visit us at futureecologies.net. Funding for this episode was provided by the Canada Council for the Arts. But ongoing support for this podcast comes from listeners just like you. To keep this show going, join us at patreon.com/futureecologies. And if you like what we're doing, please just spread the word. It really helps.
Mendel Skulski 44:38
See you in Part Two
Part 2 Transcription
Introduction Voiceover 00:02
You are listening to season five of Future Ecologies.
Mendel Skulski 00:05
Before we start the show, we want to send a huge thank you to our amazing community on Patreon. Future Ecologies just wouldn't be possible without you, and we are beyond grateful to have your support. We hope it's obvious that every one of our episodes is a pretty considerable effort. Every single patron means more ambitious stories, fair pay for more guest producers, musicians, and other collaborators, and gets us closer to a living wage to do what we love to do — Making this show. We'd do it for free, if we could. But until that day comes, we're relying on listeners like you.
Mendel Skulski 00:52
We make this show because we think it has the potential to make a real difference in the world. Maybe it's already made a difference in yours. So to keep this podcast going and growing, while staying ad free and independent. Join us at futureecologies.net/patrons Okay, that's all. On to part two of Spiders Song.
Mendel Skulski 01:24
Welcome back. My name is Mendel.
Adam Huggins 01:27
And I'm Adam.
Mendel Skulski 01:28
And this is Future Ecologies. Today, in Spiders Song Part Two, we're taking our seats in the concert hall of life — audience to the grand dance of evolution, with taxonomist, phylogenetic theoretician, and jumping spider devotee Wayne Maddison.
Wayne Maddison 01:47
Hi. Good to be back.
Adam Huggins 01:48
In other words, we are jumping in right where we left off.
Mendel Skulski 01:52
So do you want to give us a quick recap?
Adam Huggins 01:56
Sure. Jumping spiders are basically like tiny, eight legged, big eyed cats, slash birds of paradise — in that there are bedazzled males that court mates by dancing. And also by singing! In a manner of speaking... they vibrate.
Mendel Skulski 02:14
Yeah, go on.
Adam Huggins 02:16
And not only are their species really diverse in shape, and color, they also demonstrate a lot of convergent evolutionary patterns, which are not limited to independently and repeatedly developing color vision, ever more complex courtship rituals, a bunch of them have become ant-like, and there's something going on with their Y chromosomes.
Mendel Skulski 02:39
Yeah, mostly. The Y chromosome thing is actually just the one genus Habronattus, not all jumping spiders. But it'll be important later on, I promise.
Mendel Skulski 02:56
Where we left off in Part One, Wayne was overcome by his sense of awe — that evolution isn't just an endless chaos of diversity. It seems to cohere around certain patterns, motifs, melodies, themes and variations. It seemed to him like the grandest possible symphony. If only he could hear it.
Wayne Maddison 03:28
And at first, I didn't know what to do with that. But then I thought "Oh! I'm a computer programmer. I do visualizations of change on phylogenetic trees. Why don't I program a sonification of change on trees?"
Adam Huggins 03:43
I'm assuming what a visualization is to our eyes, a sonification would be to our ears.
Mendel Skulski 03:48
Yeah. sonification is like transmogrifying data into sound. In the same way that you might turn that same data into a graph. Sonification is the auditory equivalent.
Adam Huggins 04:02
So last episode, we were figuratively talking about how evolution is a form of music. And now you're talking about literally making evolutionary patterns into music.
Mendel Skulski 04:13
Yeah, exactly. So, this practice of sonification has been used to explore and communicate climate data, X-ray astrophotography, prime numbers, and even sequences of DNA itself.
Mendel Skulski 04:50
But what Wayne is talking about here is sonifying a phylogeny — an entire family tree of many organisms.
Wayne Maddison 04:59
A phylogenetic tree is a statement about the history of lineages in the past. And we can't actually go back in a time machine and see those lineages, so we have to reconstruct it. And we can reconstruct it with lots of data, occasionally through fossils. But mostly nowadays, we use genetic data to reconstruct these trees. And it's pretty clear, we're doing a pretty good job of it, because we've got so much data that's all speaking to the same phylogenetic tree. But nonetheless, it's still a hypothesis.
Mendel Skulski 05:30
So to draw a phylogenetic tree, they have to gather specimens, sample their DNA, and assess them for different characteristics, like which ones have Y chromosomes. Then they use some of the statistical tools that Wayne developed to create an estimate of who branched off from who, and what the characteristics of those ancestors were most likely to be.
Adam Huggins 05:55
So like, if a scientist took you and me, they could cast back and figure out who our most recent common ancestor was and what traits they might have had — based on what you know about us, and maybe some fossils.
Mendel Skulski 06:11
And some DNA.
Adam Huggins 06:12
Yeah and a computer program. Okay.
Mendel Skulski 06:14
Yeah. So so after they've done that, they have a sequence of all these different lineages, starting from a common root, and then branching and changing through time.
Wayne Maddison 06:25
But what would it sound like? Would we hear harmonies would we hear melodies clearly, and so forth? I didn't know.
Mendel Skulski 06:32
And as far as I could tell, although this world of data sonification is growing really rapidly, the sonification of phylogeny is unprecedented. Wayne's experiment would be a world first.
Wayne Maddison 06:47
I wanted this to have some basis of reality. So I started with a real dataset of Habronattus.
Mendel Skulski 06:51
Habronattus, also known as the paradise jumping spiders, most of which are native to North America. And the characteristics examined by that dataset were the various sex chromosomes...
Wayne Maddison 07:00
and the issues of the the chiasma localization.
Adam Huggins 07:08
... that is, that is not a term that I am familiar with.
Mendel Skulski 07:12
Okay, bear with me for one last piece of cellular biology.
Mendel Skulski 07:17
If we must.
Mendel Skulski 07:18
Remember that you've got half of your chromosomes from each of your parents, right?
Adam Huggins 07:23
Yes.
Mendel Skulski 07:24
So well, most of the time, the chromosomes from both contributors are paired up, but separate. But during meiosis, the moment at which sperm or eggs are being produced, the DNA from each pair of chromosomes is shuffled together, swapping the copies of genes from either parent. That's the actual moment of genetic recombination that gives you variations.
Adam Huggins 07:47
Yeah, no, no, I'm, I am still with you.
Mendel Skulski 07:49
So the chiasma is the crossover point along the leg of the chromosome, where that swap takes place.
Adam Huggins 07:57
Got it! So if you're picturing these cute little X chromosomes with their little dancing legs, right, four legs, it's like, where is that spot where they cross over
Mendel Skulski 08:06
And swap.
Adam Huggins 08:06
and swap their information. Yeah, okay.
Mendel Skulski 08:09
Wayne had data that included the physical measurements of where the chiasma was located for each of these species of Habronattus jumping spiders. It might be closer to the middle of the chromosome, or closer to the end.
Wayne Maddison 08:20
So we were looking for a correlation between where the chiasmata occurred along the chromosome and the evolution of the Y chromosome. And at first glance, you might think "Well, why should those even be connected? It's not as if you needed the chiasmata in a place to generate the Y." So they seemed like two different aspects of the chromosomes.
Wayne Maddison 08:41
There had been a prediction that there should be some sort of correlation in this case that you might expect to see when there is a Y, the chiasmata would be more towards the tips of the chromosomes. So that was before our study. And it turned out that when we looked at it, that correlation is actually there.
Mendel Skulski 09:00
And in general, correlations like these are exactly what evolutionary biologists are looking for — puzzling out why when one feature is like this, another feature tends to be like that. So Wayne decided to sonify this family tree of Habronattus jumping spiders, comparing the location of their chiasmata with the evolution of a new Y chromosome.
Wayne Maddison 09:29
So here's how it turned out. First, let's just focus on the speciation events those points where lineages diverge. Every time you hear a tone, that's a spider lineage splitting in two.
Wayne Maddison 09:52
The next layer has to do with the chiasmata, where they are in the chromosomes. And because where they are in the chromosomes is variable, like it's a continuous variable, you're gonna hear the tone going up and down in different amounts as the chiasmata slide up or down.
Wayne Maddison 10:14
So, you know, at this point, I'm thinking "Hmm, I'm not... I'm not really hearing any grand symphonies yet, it's sort of intriguing, but it's not sounding particularly orderly to me." But, you know, I went ahead and tried it now with the Y chromosomes. So here, you're going to hear a little ping, every time a Y chromosome evolves, and a second little ping a different sort, if it actually reverses back to loss of Y.
Wayne Maddison 10:50
And now, here are all of them — the speciation events, charismata, and the Y chromosome — all together.
Wayne Maddison 11:15
I mean, I have heard 20th century classical music that sounded a little bit like that, but it really wasn't the symphony that I was expecting.
Adam Huggins 11:22
I mean, I think I enjoyed that, because I have a love of John Carpenter horror movies from like the 70s, and 80s, and 90s.
Wayne Maddison 11:31
And looking back, I can see that there were a few things wrong with it. The first being how it starts slowly, and then gets busier and busier and busier, as if suddenly all sorts of extra things are happening.
Mendel Skulski 11:42
Like it just gets exponentially louder and denser, until it suddenly ends — which isn't really the shape of most music that we tend to listen to.
Adam Huggins 11:54
No, not not mostly no.
Mendel Skulski 11:57
So why do you think the data sounded like that?
Adam Huggins 12:01
Well, speciation, right? Evolution tends to become more complex over time. All of the phylogenetic trees that I have ever seen begin with a single line, and split and split and split and split and split until you've got an exponential number more species than when you started. So yeah, it makes perfect sense.
Mendel Skulski 12:22
But remember that these trees are constructed by calculating back from species that are still around today. So what's missing?
Adam Huggins 12:33
I mean, we're missing all of the spiders that have gone extinct.
Mendel Skulski 12:36
Bingo.
Wayne Maddison 12:37
Part of the problem with extinct lineages is that we don't see them today. So we don't know exactly how many there are in Habronattus. And there are no known fossils, it's not like we can figure it out that way. But we can get an estimate of how many there likely would have been. And so one way to do this is to do a simulation of the dynamics of branching and extinction. And we can sort of populate all those lower parts of the tree where things went extinct. And that would make it so that it was more even in terms of the busyness all the way through.
Mendel Skulski 13:10
And if you you know, if you were to simulate those extinct lineages, it raises questions about whether you'd want to be able to hear the difference between the real and the imaginary ones. And in the end, with all of the various branches, you still have to deal with a lot of overlapping sound.
Wayne Maddison 13:29
The second thing that's wrong, well, there's probably more than one here. But the second thing that's wrong is that you're not able to really hear each of the voices and the melody that it might be playing, because I'm using the same set of notes all through the whole tree. And that what I really needed to have done was somehow distinguish all these voices so that you could hear them separately. So it was almost like I should have said, okay, at the base of the tree at the root, there was a divergence event. And that split between the woodwinds and the strings, for instance. And then on the lineage of strings, it split again between the bass and all the smaller ones, and likewise on the woodwinds. And that perhaps, if you had it so that the voices were distinguishable, you could hear them as different, then you could more easily hear the little melodies that were happening as chiasmata and Y chromosome evolution followed each other. But I realized, "Oh, this is going to take a lot more work than I'm ready to do." There were lots of spiders waiting for me to study them.
Mendel Skulski 14:33
And so, four years ago, that's basically where the story would have ended — with a beautiful metaphor, and a not quite as beautiful sonification. And I wasn't satisfied with that.
Mendel Skulski 14:48
"I... I was wondering...
Mendel Skulski 14:52
so I asked Wayne, if I could take my own spin at it.
Mendel Skulski 14:55
"And sort of try to take it to the next step as part of this project."
Wayne Maddison 15:00
Sure, I think that could be fun.
Mendel Skulski 15:03
And so I tried. But after a few very enthusiastic but ultimately false starts, I too realized that this was a way bigger project than I had anticipated. Not least because at the time I, I didn't really know anything about making music. But it was this project that was my motivation to learn. And even while this project was on the backburner, I fell in love with learning the patterns of music, and with the principles of electronic synthesis. I fell in love with making music just for its own sake.
Adam Huggins 15:42
I enjoy listening to the music you make.
Mendel Skulski 15:44
Thank you. You know, looking back, I would say that this was one of my Divide Creek moments. Like this story, put me on a path. And I think I'll be on it for the rest of my life.
Adam Huggins 16:01
I know that feeling. Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 16:03
But the other part was that in order to make it happen, I needed help. In fact, I needed a whole team.
Adam Huggins 16:12
Mendel that's called a band.
Mendel Skulski 16:17
Well, allow me to introduce Duncan Geere.
Duncan Geere 16:20
Hello, what's up party people?
Mendel Skulski 16:23
And Miriam Quick.
Miriam Quick 16:24
The previous slide where we have the phylogenetic tree, does the horizontal axis represent time on a linear scale? Or does it represent some other degree of change,
Mendel Skulski 16:34
Duncan and Miriam are information designers, and they're the hosts of a really wonderful podcast that's completely dedicated to data sonification. That's called Loud Numbers. Next,
Damien de Vienne 16:47
There must have been a molecular clock.
Mendel Skulski 16:50
This is Damian de Vienne, evolutionary biologist at the University of Lyon.
Damien de Vienne 16:55
So you have a branch length usually represent the number of mutations that occur along these branch. And then if you have a hypothesis of how fast mutation accumulates, then you can transform that to time,
Mendel Skulski 17:09
I did actually end up finding one other precedent for phylogenetic sonification after Wayne's original attempt. It wasn't exactly a piece of music, but more like a proof of concept. Damien was a co author, along with his friend, Henri,
Henri Boutin 17:27
We've done a little batch in pure data, which was sort of a test just to see if it's possible to sonify trees like that.
Mendel Skulski 17:35
This is Henri Boutin, acoustic researcher at IRCAM. That proof of concept that I found was really just a side project between him and Damien.
Henri Boutin 17:42
We are friends since a lot of time. We used to do music and things like that. But we've never, we've never worked together. And this was the first opportunity to work together.
Mendel Skulski 17:57
And finally, local wizard slash generative music researcher and PhD student, Simon Overstall.
Simon Overstall 18:04
Good morning.
Mendel Skulski 18:05
Who joined me in Pacific timezone solidarity whenever we met with our European collaborators.
Simon Overstall 18:13
I need another coffee now.
Adam Huggins 18:15
So what did you do with this incredible team of people?
Mendel Skulski 18:18
Well, I think it's probably better if I spare you the prototypes and the meetings and the revisions, I'll just jump straight to what we ended up with. Because just like Wayne's version, I'm going to need to explain what you're about to hear.
Adam Huggins 18:37
Yeah, all of the all of the best music requires extensive exposition, and I am here for it.
Mendel Skulski 18:43
Well, in this case, yes.
Adam Huggins 18:45
I'm all ears.
Mendel Skulski 18:46
So here we're using the same underlying data as Wayne. We've got these species of Habronattus jumping spiders, we know the location of their chiasmata and whether or not they have Y chromosomes. But the difference between our interpretations starts with how we represent time.
Adam Huggins 19:06
Okay.
Mendel Skulski 19:06
The tree itself is the same, and we're not simulating any extinct species. We're just approaching playback in kind of a different way.
Adam Huggins 19:16
But what do you mean by that?
Mendel Skulski 19:17
So time still flows from the past to the present. But to avoid that exponential cacophony of all the parallel branches, we decided not to play all the lineages at the same time,
Adam Huggins 19:30
Ah that makes sense. So what did you do instead?
Mendel Skulski 19:33
You can kind of think about it as a series of Divide Creeks. We always start at the same place, like the headwaters of the stream, the root of the tree.
Adam Huggins 19:45
The last common ancestor between all of these species
Mendel Skulski 19:48
Yeah, exactly. So we follow that one lineage until at some point, it splits in two. Then we follow those two branches. until they both reach the present day. And because the scaling of time by branch length isn't linear, one branch will probably reach its end before the other one. But once they've both finished, we pause and cycle back to the beginning.
Wayne Maddison 20:18
So it's basically that they're just two voices at any single point. Got it. Okay.
Mendel Skulski 20:23
And each of these trips from the root to the two tips, represents approximately 5 million years of evolution.
Adam Huggins 20:30
Wow. Okay. And how long does it take in like real time.
Mendel Skulski 20:34
It kind of depends on which branch are listening to, but a few seconds to tens of seconds.
Adam Huggins 20:41
Got it.
Mendel Skulski 20:42
Now, because we're only listening to the branches of this tree one pair at a time, it takes a lot longer to hear the whole thing. But I also think that makes it a lot more musical.
Adam Huggins 20:54
Sure. But what are we actually hearing as we move down the creek? So to speak.
Mendel Skulski 20:59
So every time a lineage reaches a point of speciation, where its path might have gone one way or another, it plays a chord. Or more precisely, it plays an arpeggio. Which is like a chord with all the notes spread out. And the notes that are in that arpeggio depend on which daughter lineage our current branch followed, either descending to the right or to the left along the tree.
Adam Huggins 21:33
What do right and left mean in this situation?
Mendel Skulski 21:38
So when you're drawing a phylogenetic tree, the order of the branches, and really what's left and what's right... it's all pretty much arbitrary. So this is just a way of having a simple rule about the pitch of the notes that makes each unique branching path, a unique melody.
Adam Huggins 21:57
Okay, yeah, left, right, one way, the other way.
Mendel Skulski 22:00
One way, the other way.
Adam Huggins 22:01
And so each unique species plays out as a unique series of notes.
Mendel Skulski 22:06
Yeah. Yeah, they all start in the same place, but eventually find themselves somewhere different.
Adam Huggins 22:13
So what is the rule? What are the actual notes in that melody? What do they mean?
Mendel Skulski 22:17
Well, the chord that you'll hear the arpeggio is only ever at most four notes. And that's telling the story of four generations. So the great great grandmother note is forgotten. And the daughter note is added. Depending on that, quote, unquote, direction of descendants, a daughter note might be either a minor seventh above the pitch of its mother. Or a perfect fifth below.
Adam Huggins 22:51
Okay, so as we go, we forget a little bit about our ancestors. We may not know exactly what those species were, or what their names were or what their dances were like.
Mendel Skulski 23:02
Yeah. But we do still have some sense of where we came from.
Adam Huggins 23:06
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 23:07
Who we came from.
Adam Huggins 23:08
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 23:09
Also, it's important that I point out that the arpeggio isn't in order of oldest to youngest, it's just in note order, either going up or down.
Wayne Maddison 23:18
And if it's descending or ascending, then it just gets put in its place. Okay.
Mendel Skulski 23:23
And to keep things musical, the notes will wrap to a four octave range.
Adam Huggins 23:28
Okay.
Mendel Skulski 23:28
But the melody isn't actually the important part.
Adam Huggins 23:33
That's what drummers tell me.
Mendel Skulski 23:35
It's true. So in this case, it's really just describing the shape of the tree. What we're trying to hear is a correlation in the data, a connection between the evolution of a Y chromosome and the location of the chiasmata — these two seemingly unconnected aspects of jumping spider biology.
Adam Huggins 23:54
Oh, yeah. Okay.
Mendel Skulski 23:56
So what I want you to pay attention to is the envelope of each note. That is, the shape of the sound — either short, and plucky or long and sustained.
Adam Huggins 24:16
Right. Waaauwww. And what does the envelope tell us?
Mendel Skulski 24:21
That's the position of the chiasmata, those crossover points on the chromosomes. The closer the chiasma gets to the tip of the chromosome, the pluckier the note.
Adam Huggins 24:31
Got it.
Mendel Skulski 24:32
And the evolution of a new Y chromosome is signaled by a few things as they arrive along the branch. What you'll first hear is a triangle ringing out.
Mendel Skulski 24:44
Then when you hear the arpeggio, you'll notice that the direction will change from ascending to descending. So what I want you to listen for is how often pluck your notes are arranged in a descending arpeggio.
Mendel Skulski 25:05
Remember the sound of a triangle is your cue that a Y chromosome has arrived.
Adam Huggins 25:10
Okay. Will there be a quiz at the end?
Mendel Skulski 25:13
No, you can just enjoy yourself.
Adam Huggins 25:16
Okay.
Mendel Skulski 25:17
Anyhow, that's, that's the main correlation that we were trying to listen for. But we didn't stop there. Next we took Wayne's suggestion that the voices really ought to evolve more than just in terms of melody, but also, timbre,
Adam Huggins 25:33
Timbre, so like the character of the sound. So do they split into like the strings and the woodwinds? And so on and so forth?
Mendel Skulski 25:41
Well, not exactly.
Adam Huggins 25:58
So what I gather from all of that... is that things are changing.
Mendel Skulski 26:05
That's the case. The more the spiders mutate, the more they sound like different instruments. And this is actually like a way of describing the evolutionary distance along a branch. And one thing I find interesting is how suddenly these changes can sometimes happen. It could be an artifact of how we've processed the data. But it also seems that evolution can be a lot less gradual than we usually expect.
Adam Huggins 26:33
Yeah, that reminds me of a concept that we call punctuated equilibrium, which is just that, like in evolution, things sort of can stay very stable for quite some time. And then suddenly, there's a bunch of fairly large changes, right? The environment shifted dramatically in some way or there was a development of some kind of mutation. And everything happens all at once.
Mendel Skulski 26:58
Exactly, yeah, it kind of comes out of nowhere. And another kind of subtle thing you might notice is that where the voices are positioned in stereo, mimics their location on the tree. So you'll hear them moving around your head, as they follow their branches, getting a little quieter as they go out towards the tips.
Wayne Maddison 27:29
Of course, of course, stereo can be part of this, I didn't think of that.
Mendel Skulski 27:33
So I hope you're wearing headphones.
Adam Huggins 27:35
Never listen to Future Ecologies without your headphones.
Mendel Skulski 27:38
We really appreciate it.
Mendel Skulski 27:40
Lastly, to mark time, between each cycle of dividing creeks, before we return to the root of the tree, you'll hear a short clip of one of our spider friends singing.
Mendel Skulski 27:55
We processed that through a synthesizer that models the physics of a plucked string, providing a kind of drone for the entire piece — as though the spiders themselves are strumming.
Wayne Maddison 28:13
So this is the spider playing a guitar, so to speak. Wow.
Adam Huggins 28:20
That's majestic. I... I love that.
Mendel Skulski 28:26
And now, Spiders Song, take two, in its entirety.
Wayne Maddison 34:38
That is really cool. It's... it's really beautiful. That's not at all what I would have expected. The sense of how how rich are the spiders in these lineages comes across, you know, it's it's not... it's... the multi dimensionality of it becomes clear, right of all of this.
Adam Huggins 35:04
I feel like I want a whole collection of different phylogenies sonified like this, and just put them on and let my brain simmer
Wayne Maddison 35:28
The thing that I'm trying to locate is whether or not the pings... how they're connected with one another, and they're occasional enough that it's hard to find them. Right, that could just be because the data is not showing it clearly.
Wayne Maddison 35:43
But the other thing is, then I also felt like, it was the sort of thing just like any music — that there's a little bit of a learning process as to how to hear a new sort of music, where you start to be able to notice the pattern that you hadn't noticed before, which actually is a lot like the way science works, right? You know, you get started and you think that there's no pattern there. And it's actually just that you're not used to seeing it.
Wayne Maddison 36:15
Thing about using statistics is that if you have the right sort of data, lots of it, than you almost don't need statistics, because it just like "well, there it is." But the more subtle is the pattern, the fewer the replicates there are, the more that processing and examining and sifting is important to be able to actually recognize that signal there. And I think in this case, yeah, there's probably a pattern here between sex chromosome evolution and chiasma localization, but it's not a ton of replicates. And it's just two features talking to one another, so to speak.
Wayne Maddison 36:54
On the other hand, that's when if you had something like, you know, DNA sequence data across the genome or something, there's probably a way to do it like, yeah, you'd still have to think a lot about how to turn it into sound. But there are probably things that once you get the right way to do it, you don't need to learn anything to be able to hear the patterns, right? It'll just jump right out at you.
Mendel Skulski 37:22
So is that a symphony? No. And I think that's okay. This isn't supposed to be the way we listen to phylogeny, to the music of evolution. It's just a few ideas for how we could. And if you want to build on this one, I'm making the whole patch open-source. That'll be up on our website,
Adam Huggins 37:45
futureecologies.net
Adam Huggins 37:49
I can't wait to hear some spider remixes, or even some other phylogenies put through this system.
Mendel Skulski 37:55
Me neither. But, you know, maybe first, it's worth asking, what's the point of this whole exercise?
Adam Huggins 38:03
I can totally be the person that asked that, Mendel. What is the point?
Mendel Skulski 38:09
So I guess I just want to make a distinction that there are really two big types of sonification. And across all of them, the goal is always to get the data to speak. But in my case, the key is that I already knew the story that I wanted to tell. And I wanted it to sound good, right? I wanted it to be at least a little musical.
Adam Huggins 38:36
You wanted to tell a story and you wanted it to sound good, which is why you make a podcast, presumably.
Mendel Skulski 38:41
That's why we're here! And the data were going to be there no matter what, right? And I realized that being able to really hear them, to hear the meaning and the patterns was so dependent on how I... how I tuned the whole system towards those. But if I were actually trying to do science, to discover something new, it would have been a completely different exercise. And that's really the difference between the explanatory and the exploratory.
Adam Huggins 39:16
So yeah, it sounds like, you know, to me that you were interested in the challenge. You were interested in developing your skills musically. And you were interested in telling this really interesting story.
Mendel Skulski 39:27
Yeah.
Adam Huggins 39:28
But, you know, devil's advocate over here. Does this have any scientific utility, like, could data sonification for phylogeny be useful?
Wayne Maddison 39:39
For a lot of things we are still in an exploratory mode, and we don't have the hypotheses yet there. And, you know, maybe it'll turn out that you somehow tweak this so that it handles genomes in a particular way, and it's something to do with, I don't know the shapes of proteins or something like that. And you start playing it, and people start noticing patterns from the way it sounds that then turn into testable ideas in the laboratory. And you could see that with with genomic data as being a distinct possibility!
Wayne Maddison 40:15
You know, in your sonification, like, just as with all science, there has to be a little bit of imposition of our ideas. Because if we don't have ideas that we're slightly imposing on nature, we can't even make sense of it all, right? It's like, this is a dialogue between the telling and the listening. And you don't want to go too far, you don't want to have it to be on your head — the set of ideas, or just your hypotheses with no grounding, no listening to what nature is trying to tell us. But you have to do that to some extent. And when the data are a little bit sparse, or nature hasn't given you a lot of replicates or something like that, yeah, then you're going to be able to hear your own voice a little bit more strongly, and nature's a little bit less. When you got tons of data, or there's a really strong pattern there, then your voice is going to start to fade a little bit, as it should, and you're going to hear nature speak more clearly. But it's always going to be a balance.
Wayne Maddison 41:03
And you know, we can't remove ourselves from science, the observer is always there. The preconceptions that the observer has, will always be there. But hopefully, there'll be enough listening that nature's always there whispering, to keep us at least somewhat connected to reality.
Adam Huggins 41:25
This is, I don't know if it's tangent, but I studied experimental film as my undergrad. I'm a film school dropout. And I loved experimental film, not because I would stare at it really hard. And think about it really hard. And try to derive the meaning from all of the kind of madness up there on the screen. No, I would sit there watching those films, often late at night, in a lecture hall with very few people in it. And I would just let them wash over me and allow them to do things to my brain that other narrative, cinema couldn't do, right? Because it's so programmed to tell you this particular thing, or that particular thing. And I liked that about this, that, you know, somebody has put effort obviously into into making it beautiful, and to making it comprehensible to us. But there's a lot of meaning in there. And it's not at all clear exactly what it is from the jump, you have to let it wash over you. And maybe we'll learn something about the phylogeny of jumping spiders. Or maybe what, you know, jumps out at us will be something entirely different. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be my brain in the music of jumping spiders.
Mendel Skulski 42:48
You're welcome. And yeah, the science is just one part of it. I felt like my job was to honor the beauty of these little spiders.
Adam Huggins 42:59
They are quite beautiful. I guess that raises the question like these spiders have presumably evolved all of these things to appeal to one another. Why do you think that they're so captivating to us as well?
Mendel Skulski 43:17
At some level, it's a coincidence, right? Like, it's just happenstance that female jumping spiders seem to respond to the same sort of things that we do, right, like flashy colors, and interesting vibrations, just like us. So male jumping spiders have evolved to be dazzling — dazzling in ways that appeal to both of us. And I think, over evolutionary time, jumping spiders are literally being shaped by you might say, their own attention to beauty.
Wayne Maddison 43:52
You know, science is typically defined by the very rigorous style of testing that we do. But there's the other half of that, which is the generation of ideas that we then subsequently test. And that generation of ideas doesn't have to come in any rigorous way it can come from anything. And an attention to beauty, that's jostling the way we look at the world. It's giving us surprises, it's helping us to notice things that we would have never noticed. An attention to beauty may make us think about nature in ways that generate... that generate new ideas that we can then test, right. It's a source of the creativity that allows science to proceed. So that actually has a benefit on discovering truth.
Wayne Maddison 44:37
Most things that I've discovered, either about the spiders themselves, or about how we approach nature as scientists, the methods we use, those have useful consequences. You know, we'll learn about how the world works and that can help us survive in fact. But a lot of my pursuit of science is connected with this pursuit of beauty. It's... it's a motivation. It's... in some ways, it's almost as if the science is a byproduct.
Wayne Maddison 45:05
You know, I fell in love with the beauty of the world. When I looked at that jumping spider, Phiddy, I saw a part of myself there, there was a sense of something in common. And I know that I fell in love first with a jumping spider. But I also know it could have been something else, it could have been a fungus, it could have been a beetle, it could have been an earthworm. I think if you look closely enough, you can really fall in love with just about anything.
Wayne Maddison 45:41
As I've gone around the world, and found these amazingly beautiful spiders, many of which I know are not yet described by scientists, I wonder, "Am I the first person to see this sort of spider? Like, has anybody ever looked at this sort of spider before." But at the same time, as I do that, I also wonder, "Am I going to be the last to see them alive?" Because many of the environments that we have out there are disappearing, the forests are being cut down, habitat loss, and now climate change is having an effect everywhere. As a scientist, I think the loss of the species is a loss of data, of course — like we won't be able to learn from them anymore. But it's also simply a loss of beauty.
Wayne Maddison 46:25
You know, you have to think about how we're going to turn that around. And we could say, well, we need to do it because of this. And we could sort of impose a sense of morally we need to do this. But I don't think people tend to respond well to an imposed ethics like that. In fact, I tend to think that we don't choose what we want to do by our ethics, we tend to retrofit our ethics to what we want to do. So if we're really going to change the world, we have to basically change what we care about, change our desires. We have to fall in love with the planet. We have to fall in love with all the beauty that's here. So as a scientist, I feel I have a moral responsibility, not just to talk about results, but to talk about beauty. I have to talk about more than the truths that I uncover.
Mendel Skulski 47:15
For all of us, scientists, musicians, and maybe even jumping spiders — our sense of beauty is part of our intrinsic motivation. Each of us, in our own way, witnesses the world, and responds to it. Because there is no such thing as beauty without an audience.
Mendel Skulski 47:48
This series of Future Ecologies was produced by me, Mendel Skulski, but not without help from so many others. Thanks to my amazing sonification collaborators: Damien de Vienne, Miriam Quick, Duncan Geere, Simon Overstall, and Henri Boutin. And if you're into this sort of thing, then you'll love Duncan and Miriam's podcast, Loud Numbers.
Mendel Skulski 48:14
Thanks, of course, to my co host, Adam Huggins and our guest, Wayne Maddison. Our sonification was produced in Max/MSP using phylogenetic data gathered by Wayne Maddison and Dr. Genevieve Leduc-Robert. For the source code, the full length track, and to learn more about how it works, head to futureecologies.net.
Mendel Skulski 48:39
All of our supporters on Patreon will be getting even more behind the scenes and other bonus content. To get access, join our community at patreon.com/futureecologies.
Mendel Skulski 48:52
All the jumping spider audio recordings you heard came courtesy of Dr. Damian Elias and his lab at UC Berkeley. Sonification examples came from Chris Chafe, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Mark Evanstein, and Mark Temple.
Mendel Skulski 49:09
Special thanks to Ruby Singh, Vincent van Haaff, Teo Kaye, Erin Robinsong, Cait Hurley, Kieran Fanning, and to Lobe Spatial Sound Studio — Kate de Lorme, Hannah Acton, Ian Wyatt, Eric Chad, and Sev Shaban. And thanks to Leya Tess for the amazing illustrations.
Mendel Skulski 49:32
Funding for this series was provided by the Canada Council for the Arts. But ongoing support for this podcast comes from listeners just like you. To keep this show going. join our community at patreon.com/futureecologies. And if you like what we're doing, please just spread the word. It really helps.
Mendel Skulski 49:56
Till next time, thanks for listening.