Do wolf spiders’ egg-sacs emit tactochemical signals perceived by mothers?

Fanny Ruhland, Stefan Schulz, Maxime R Hervé and Marie Trabalon

Behavioral Ecology, 2019, vol. 30, issue 2, 570-581

Abstract: Parent–offspring relationships take many forms. One particular form of parental behavior is egg care when parents brood their eggs after laying them. Parents of many oviparous vertebrates and terrestrial arthropods brood their eggs. Spiders present a particular interesting form of parental behavior, enclosing their eggs in a silk sac (or egg-sac) and can care for it until spiderlings emerge. This study investigated proximal cues which stimulate the wolf spider Pardosa saltans (Lycosidae) to care for their egg-sacs, transport them for 30 days and open it to allow spiderlings to emerge. We showed that mothers discriminate between egg-sacs differencing in mass (empty or not) as they do not hang an empty egg-sacs but do not discriminate between egg-sacs with viable and nonviable juveniles either when manipulating or when hanging them. However, mothers do not open nonviable egg-sacs but abandon them only at the end of the juvenile development period when spiderlings are due to emerge (30-day-old egg-sacs). We investigated egg-sac silk chemical cues that mothers detected by presenting them egg-sacs washed with different polar solvents or chemical egg-sacs silk extracts. We identified the polar and apolar chemical compounds of lipid extracts of egg-sacs detected by mothers during manipulation. Our results demonstrate that these compounds stimulate maternal care, and mothers detect mobility of juveniles at the end of the postembryonic period, when juveniles are ready to emerge from a 30-day-old egg-sacs indicating that tactochemical stimuli are involved in egg-sacs care. Wolf spiders mothers protect their eggs in a silk sac and guard it for 30 days. We show that mothers detect signals (vibrations, odours) emitted by the young through the egg-sac and that they consequently modulate their behavior in response to these signals. These signals inform the mother when she should open the sac to allow her young to emerge or inform that her young are dead.

Keywords: lycosid; maternal behavior; Pardosa saltans; silk lipids; viability of juveniles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/ary197 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:30:y:2019:i:2:p:570-581.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().