New research from the Hebets Lab at University of Nebraska Lincoln: _Agelenopsis_ grass spiders in noisy urban environments weave webs with built-in noise dampening—as opposed to their rural cousins, who built more sensitive webs when researchers turned up the volume.
From the NYT article linked below:
> “While animal sensory systems can, and do, certainly adapt over evolutionary time to changing environmental conditions, this takes time,” Dr. Hebets said. “Behavioral changes, however, can be immediate.”
This offers an intriguing tangent: webs are part of a spider's sensory apparatus but are constantly re-built, and behavioural plasticity lets them "evolve" much faster—an evolution you can't track by looking at physical traits alone.
Anecdotally, _Agelenopsis_ are masters at adapting their flat sheet webs to even the unlikeliest urban environments! So it's not a surprise they are adaptable in other ways as well.
Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.02.041 
NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/science/spiders-webs-noise-pollution.html // https://archive.ph/Mu7KJ
