Study
Spider Behaviour: Flexibility and Versatility
Herberstein, Marie Elisabeth
Cambridge University Press, 2011
An edited synthesis of spider behaviour: foraging strategies from web-building to active hunting, courtship and mating systems, maternal care, dispersal, and the extent to which spider behaviour is flexible rather than fixed.
- Studied in
- Araneae
- Sample size
- edited synthesis of spider behavioural research
Spider behaviour is far more plastic than the stereotype of a hard-wired web-builder allows. Web design is adjusted to prey availability and to previous capture success; hunting strategies shift with hunger and experience; and courtship is frequently prolonged, mutual and sensitive to female state. Sexual cannibalism occurs in a minority of species and is neither universal nor typically the outcome of mating.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Behavioural flexibility is a general feature of spiders rather than a curiosity confined to the cognitively distinctive jumping spiders.
How NatureHQ reads it
The cannibalism point is the one worth carrying into the prose. It happens, it is well documented in particular species such as some orb-weavers and redbacks, and it has been generalised into "female spiders eat the male" as though it were the normal end of spider courtship. In most species the male leaves.
- An edited volume; depth varies by chapter and by how well studied each family is.
- Orb-weavers and jumping spiders are heavily over-represented relative to their share of the order.
- Laboratory arenas are a poor model for the spatial complexity of a real web site.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
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Published by: Academic book publishersPublished as an academic monograph.
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