I have had the great fortune of supervising the talented young scientist Mollie Davies for her undergraduate project at Oxford Brookes University. Part of this project has now been published in the open access journal Insects. In the study, we looked who different tuning forks (a 256 Hz and 440 Hz), and a wire applied to either the orb web (the tuning forks) or the spider (the wire) could be used to generate prey capture or anti-predatory (escape) behaviour in the autumn spider Metellina segmentata.
We found that the 440 Hz tuning fork consistently stimulated prey capture responses, while the 256 Hz had a more mixed response but tended to generate escape behaviours. The difference could be because larger, and potentially more dangerous, insects tend to buzz with a lower frequency. The metal wire generated a mixture of responses including a fairly high rate of no responses, so we conclude that tuning forks could be an important tool for studying behaviours in orb web spiders in the wild.
Davies, M. S. and Hesselberg, T. (2022). The use of tuning forks for studying behavioural responses in orb web spiders. Insects 2022, 13, 370.
https://doi.org/10.3390/insects13040370
Abstract
Spiders and their webs are often used as model organisms to study a wide range of behaviours. However, these behavioural studies are often carried out in the laboratory, and the few field studies usually result in large amounts of video footage and subsequent labour-intensive data analysis. Thus, we aimed to devise a cost- and time-effective method for studying the behaviour of spiders in the field, using the now almost forgotten method of stimulating webs with tuning forks. Our study looked at the viability of using 256 Hz and 440 Hz tuning forks to stimulate, anti-predatory and predatory responses in the orb web spider Metellina segmentata, respectively. To assess the consistency of the behaviours produced, we compared these to direct mechanical stimulation with a metal wire. The results suggest that the tuning forks produce relatively consistent behaviours within and between two years in contrast to the metal wire. We furthermore found no significant effects of spider length or web area on spider reaction times. However, we found significant differences in reaction times between escape and prey capture behaviours, and between tuning forks and the wire. Thus, we demonstrated the potential of tuning forks to rapidly generate quantitative data in a field setting.
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