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Web-Building Flexibility Differs in Two Spatially Constrained Orb Spiders

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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.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Diomedes Quientero, Roberto Miranda and Nikolaj Scharff for helping to identify the spider species and to William Eberhard and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments to a previous version of the manuscript. The author gratefully acknowledges the permission granted by the Parque Natural Metropolitano and the Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente (ANAM permits no. SE/A-81-08 and SE/A-104-08) to carry out this study. The study was funded by a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship.

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  1. Thomas Hesselberg

    Present address: Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PS, UK

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  1. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado, 0843-03092, Balboa, Ancón, Republic of Panamá

    Thomas Hesselberg

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Correspondence to Thomas Hesselberg.

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Hesselberg, T. Web-Building Flexibility Differs in Two Spatially Constrained Orb Spiders. J Insect Behav 26, 283–303 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10905-012-9335-7

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