Juvenile vibratory experience affects adult mate preferences in a wolf spider

Abstract

While members of the choosier sex often prefer courting mates with bright, large, or loud phenotypes, social experience can result in variation in mate preferences. Fewer studies, though, have investigated how multiple social parameters might interact to affect such preferences. In the brush-legged wolf spider, Schizocosa ocreata, asynchrony of maturation between sexes provides a time period in which females might be exposed to male courtship prior to making a mating decision. We tested whether adult females demonstrated plasticity in their preferences for vibratory signal amplitude after experience with vibratory playback during their penultimate stage. Penultimate instar females were presented unimodal vibratory courtship signals via piezoelectric disc benders, manipulating the perceived encounter rate (every other day or once per day), the number of males (one or two), and/or the vibratory amplitude (low or high). As adults, each female was presented vibratory playback of a low- or high-amplitude courtship signal in both no-choice and two-choice designs. In no-choice trials, previous experience with different amplitude signals significantly affected adult preferences, while other social parameters did not. Specifically, female S. ocreata preferred high-amplitude signals to low-amplitude signals if previously exposed to high-amplitude signals, while those previously exposed to low-amplitude signals preferred low-amplitude signals. In two-choice trials, however, females preferred high-amplitude signals regardless of their previous social experience, suggesting that innate preferences for high-amplitude signals might outweigh any learned preferences in some contexts. Results from this study complement previous social experience studies in S. ocreata, by clearly demonstrating a second sensory modality through which social learning can occur.

Significance statement

Social experience affects subsequent mate preferences in a variety of taxa, but in many instances, single parameters are examined at a time. Furthermore, in species that use multimodal communication, there remain questions about whether a single sensory modality is sufficient to elicit such plasticity. In this study, we manipulated multiple parameters using vibratory playback to examine whether social experience during the brush-legged wolf spider’s juvenile stage affected preferences for low- and high-amplitude signals as an adult. Ultimately, only the amplitude of the male’s signals that they were exposed to as a juvenile impacted adult mate preference—not the number of perceived males or how often they encountered the males. These results, along with previous studies, demonstrate that S. ocreata is capable of plasticity in response to social cues in multiple modalities.