Thursday the 5th and Friday the 6th of December, I had the great pleasure of attending the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour’s Winter Conference 2013 in London on the Evolution of Behavioural Mechanisms. I went for getting ideas on my own research into the cognition of spider web building and for finding potential case-studies and new concepts for the online animal behaviour that I am currently developing (the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education kindly funded my travel costs).
The conference proved highly useful for both of these aims. There were four very interesting plenary talk that gave an over view of current research and topics in the field. First of was Prof Melissa Bateson from Newcastle University who talked about the role that harsh environments in early life affects behaviour later in life using European Starlings as a model organism. Then Prof Reuven Dukas from McMaster University in Canada discussed social learning in insects and in adult and larval fruit flies in particular (although the concept of social learning was somewhat stretched in the latter example). Prof Simon Laughlin from Cambridge University started day two with a fascinating talk on how brain size is constrained by signal to noise ratio and energy efficiency and demonstrated that chemical signalling via hormones is much cheaper than electric signals via neurons. The Tinbergen lecture was given by Prof Marlene Zuk from the University of Minnosota, who gave a thought provoking talk on how behaviour can work as either pacemaker or gatekeeper for the evolution of novel traits. In addition there were 24 smaller talks of a very high quality. Three particular interesting talks for me were: Prof Alex Kacelnik from the University of Oxford who talked on ‘irrational’ preference for lower average gains in starlings in a risk framework as natural selection has shaped them to dislike uncertainty while waiting for a reward; Dr Alexander Kotrschal from Uppsala University talked about some very neat experiments on selecting for brain size in guppies in the connection with the expensive tissue hypothesis. Finally Prof Arnon Lotem from Tel Aviv University demonstrated the use of Agent-based Models to understand the evolution of food begging behaviour in nestlings.
In addition to listening to the great talks I was fortunate to also have the opportunity to discuss my own research on behavioural plasticity and learning in orb spiders in the form of presenting a poster, which abstract is given here:
Title: Behavioural flexibility and learning in orb spiders
Spider webs and their detailed geometry constitute an ideal system in which to study the flexibility and learning of foraging behaviour in a small-brained invertebrate. A large number of studies show that whereas spiders do not seem to improve the basic design of their webs with age, size or experience, they do modify their webs in response to previous prey catching experiences. They furthermore show an impressive flexibility in their ability to adapt their orb webs to windy conditions, leg loss, lack of gravity and constrained space. In this presentation I will primarily focus on behavioural flexibility of web-building behaviour in the latter and demonstrate how different species differ in their ability to adapt their webs to vertical and horizontal frames. Equally interesting I will show how the acacia orb spider Eustala illicitaimmediately adapts its first web to the available space, but shows no improvement in subsequent webs. I will discuss this apparent lack of learning and compare it to orb spiders’ response to less frequently occurring phenomena such as leg loss and lack of gravity.
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