Caffeine - A Drug Or Not?

Drugs are bad news – for spiders too! To test some of its psychological effects, including coffee, NASA scientists administered different drugs to spiders to see how these drugs impacted on web construction. In other words, what happens when you get a spider stoned?

I know that I shouldn’t take any coffee or caffeinated fizzy drinks after 5pm because it prevents me from falling asleep when I go to bed a few hours later! I also find it strange when people claim that they cannot start the day without a cup of coffee. Once you’re used to a green drink or even just a glass of clean water first thing in the morning, you can’t stand the taste of coffee any longer.

Back to the drugged spiders: NASA’s experiments have shown that common house spiders spin their webs in different ways according to the chemical they have been given. The more toxic, the more deformed the web.

The acid-trippy (LSD) spider wove a psychedelic, symmetrical web which was very pretty but not great at catching bugs. Those on Benzedrine – “Speed”, in the same class as Ritalin – went really fast, but without much awareness of the overall picture: it left large gaps. Spiders that were high on marijuana did a fair job spinning webs, but then got bored or distracted, appeared to lose concentration about half-way through and didn’t finish. Caffeine had the biggest effect. Found in soft drinks, tea and coffee, it made spiders incapable of spinning anything better than a few poorly organised strands with no structure but merely strung together at random.  Caffeine jitters literally turned spider webs into a haphazard affair. Something interesting to know is that caffeine is a natural pesticide, with some plants having developed caffeine within their seedlings to protect against insects. It will kill certain bugs that feed on these plants, but others, such as many beetles, have adapted to it and are unaffected.

Fortunately, there are more healthy replacements for coffee. Try some of the many different herbal teas or dandelion “coffee”. Besides the great taste, dandelion coffee, or dandelion tea, as it is more commonly known as, has a host of benefits. Another coffee substitute, Inka, is a Polish drink made from grain. It has a similar taste to coffee and is made the same way as instant coffee, but contains no caffeine.