Investigating Spider Wobble

I will start out by stating that this is not a moral "should we breed it" question - so please be patient. While at work today (I am a veterinary tech) we had a long term patient come in for routeing vaccination and watching him suddenly made me think of spiders. The dog has intention tremors - basically he has a cerebellar disease where he can't quite control his movement. As soon as his brain starts to "think" about his direction of movement, his muscles start to contract and he wobbles. When laying still and relaxed at home this is not noticeable, but as soon as something like feeding time, a trip to the vet, or a guest arrive he is wobbling all over the place - it increases with stress / excitement. In dogs this can be caused by lots of things - one in particular got me thinking.

There are some breeds where intention and other tremors are caused by a genetic CNS axon issue where the axons are abnormally myelinated (such as mylin being too thin or missing entirely). In some breeds it is a sex-linked recessive trait and in others the genetic component is unclear other than it is inheritable. Some get better with age and some are affected for life. The tremors can be mild to severe...sound familiar? Tremors in dogs that are not due to an actual disease or toxin are likely mylin / CNS issues, so it seems like this would be a good place to start if someone were to try and discover the casue of the spider wobble.


Basically the root of this question is - has anyone ever heard of or done a study to see if the wobble is actually caused by a physical issue. In dogs it can be diagnosed with physical symptoms and a CNS histopathology. It just makes me wonder if the gene that carries part of the spider look may also affect the mylin sheath.

Hmm, interesting theory! I don't have an answer but I'm intrigued.

That's extremely interesting. I wish someone somewhere could look into it.

I don't think that it would be that hard...maybe a little difficult but the research could be done. I'm not sure how hard it is to do a spinal tap on a living snake...