Sometimes biology is a better teacher than any lecturer, but it takes a keen eye, an open mind, and a bit of patience.
Let’s consider the curious case of the spider, the fly and the housecat.
“Welcome to my Parlor” is an excellent poem, about a keen invitation to a fly by a spider, the fly finally succumbing to flattery, and being eaten. While I doubt narcissism has aided many arachnids, the weaving of webs certainly has been their trademark hunting strategy for eons now. It’s a great way to get a meal, and if you’ve ever watched Japanese garden spiders weaving away in the early morning sun they are a fantastic sight, often adorned with pink, purple, and yellow on their black and grey bodies they hang motionless awaiting visitors of flies, butterflies, honeybees and the like. Masters of engineering they choose a location out of the way of predators who might destroy their work, but still near enough the flowers their own prey will seek out soon enough. Upon completion they move to the center where they will be best placed to wrangle a meal no matter where in the web it first becomes entangled. When lunch finally arrives they package it up for later, and renew their post.
In contrast, cats are attracted to motion. On seeing a fly buzzing in the kitchen they will often sit directly below it for a quarter of an hour or more, with heads swiveling like little radar towers. Ears perked, eyes bright, they actively gather information about their quarry. As the fly buzzes here and there attracted by foods, or garbage, or the drafty air currents (who really knows what a fly is thinking) the cat sits below trying to discern a pattern, any patten, however fleeting in the motion overhead. It’s nearly impossible to discern predictive information from true chaos, but the cat’s hopes are soon found with merit. Here, it will probably first flinch, feigning the first few strikes that will eventually take it to the heights above, self-testing, gauging distance. Suddenly, the real strike comes, and up the cat goes with wild acrobatics, plucking lunch from thin air and casually strolling away licking his lips.
You may find countless examples in nature of multiple solutions to similar problems. It’s an excellent way to study problem solving in a live context, where millions of years of research and development has already been done for you. The student need only learn the art of remapping solutions onto similar problems to get great value from such efforts.
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