[memetomancer]

I had a look at this paper, and in the citations I see two papers from Jonathan Pruitt!

For those unfamiliar, Jonathan Pruitt is a _former_ Professor charged with falsifying massive amounts of data relating to spider behavior. I was under the impression that most of his papers had been retracted.

I was not expecting anyone to reference his work. I will have to check it out, to see if this is still commonplace in the field - based on the hubbub and furor and #Pruittgate hashtags during the pandemic years, I was under the impression that spider biology was set back 10 years and nobody would touch the guy with a 10-foot pole.

[radicaldreamer]

I wouldn't be surprised if he was responsible for that fake spiders on drugs meme as well.

[zamnos]

I don't know about the meme, but the spider webs done by drugged spiders dates back to 1948, by Swiss pharmacologist Peter N. Witt and later repeated elsewhere. If there's questions as to it's veracity, it's not mentioned in the Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_psychoactive_drugs_o...