Collaborative paper on cues during sticky spiral construction

by | Jun 13, 2012

I have collaborated with Prof. William G. Eberhard from the Smithsonian Institute and the Universidad de Costa Rica on a study exploring the cues that orb spiders use during

The study has just been published in:

Eberhard, W. G. and Hesselberg, T. (2012). Cues that spiders (Araneae: Araneidae, Tetragnathidae) use to build orbs: lapses in attention to one set of cues because of dissonance with others? Ethology 118: 610-620.

The paper can be accessed here if you have an institutional licence. If not you are welcome to contact me for a copy.

Abstract:
Even for small animals such as spiders, behavioral decisions are sometimes influenced by multiple cues. Orb webs constitute exquisitely precise records of the stimuli the spider experienced and the decisions that it made while building its web. In addition, because spiders appear to sense their webs largely by touch, direct behavioral observations can determine which stimuli they probably sense. Previous studies have shown that when an orb-weaving spider decides how far apart to space successive sticky lines during orb construction, it responds to at least five different kinds of stimuli, all of which apparently use a cue from the web, the location of the previous, inner loop of sticky spiral (IL location), as a point of reference. Here we show that two additional cues from the web, which are related to the position of the temporary spiral (TS), also influence sticky spiral spacing. A combination of direct observations of spider movements, analyses of complete and partially complete webs, and responses to experimental modifications of the web of two species in different families, Micrathena duodecimspinosa (Araneidae) andLeucauge mariana (Tetragnathidae), indicate that both the TS-IL distance itself and the short-term memory of the change in TS-IL distance compared with that on other recently encountered radii correlate with sticky spiral spacing. When the TS-IL distance was large, the spiders apparently ceased to attend to other cues. Thus, even the relatively stereotyped behavior of orb construction includes variation that stems from attention-like mental processes.