My last paper from my research at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama has now finally been published. The study has taken quite a while to get out. First because it took a while to find the right home for it (although I appreciate the useful comments from the initial rejections as they definitely helped improve the final paper) and then because the Journal of Insect Behaviour took a while for the whole process. I originally submitted it in August 2011 (although to be fair it was not only the journal’s fault as I was very busy and took 5 months to response to the reviewers’ comments).
But I nonetheless like this study as it introduces a lot of interesting questions including the role of site exploration, anchor threads and the nature of the non-sticky temporary spiral.
Abstract
Shelter and trap-building animals that compete for limited space and/or face costly relocations benefit from being flexible in their construction behavior. Orb spiders are good examples of this and their easily quantifiable two-dimensional webs allow us to analyze the behavioral adaptations and costs in terms of higher error levels or less precision resulting from building webs in sub-optimal conditions. Here I study behavioral flexibility in spatially constrained spiders by analyzing a wide range of web parameters including measures that indicate errors during web-building. I compare the geometry of laboratory webs of two orb spiders, Cyclosa caroli and Eustala illicita, built in differently shaped experimental frames and report two major findings. i) The two species differ in their ability to build webs in constrained spaces. ii)E. illicita adjusted a range of parameters including shape, area utilization and mesh height in response to spatial constraints, but kept other parameters constant, most notably the length of anchor threads and the shape of the auxiliary spiral. I furthermore found that constrained spiders did not make significantly more errors during web-building than when they had amble space available.
Hesselberg, T. (2013). Web-building flexibility differs in two spatially constrained orb spiders. Journal of Insect Behavior 26: 283-303. DOI: 10.1007/s10905-012-9335-7
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