Effects of resource availability on the web structure of female western black widows: is the web structure constrained by physiological trade-offs?

Predators that benefit prey and prey that harm predators: unusual effects of interacting foraging adaptation

Louis-Philippe Toupin, Tom Ratz and Pierre-Olivier Montiglio

Behavioral Ecology, 2022, vol. 33, issue 6, 1170-1179

Abstract: A major challenge of biological research is to understand what generates and maintains consistent behavioral variation among animals. Time and energy trade-offs, where expressing one behavior is achieved at the expense of another, are often suggested to favor the maintenance of behavioral differences between individuals. However, few studies have investigated how individuals adjust their allocation to different functions over time and depending on resource abundance. Black widow spiders of the genus Latrodectus build persistent webs that include structural threads which protect against predators and sticky trap threads to capture prey. Web structure consistently differs among individuals in the number of trap and structural threads. To quantify the intensity of a trade-off, we assessed the relationship between the number of structural and trap threads and tested whether varying food abundance affected individual differences in web structure. We further quantified how these individual differences change over time and with food abundance. We subjected spiders to three different levels of prey abundance and monitored the structure of their webs every twelve hours. We found no evidence for a trade-off between trap and structural threads. Instead, spiders that produced more structural threads also produced more trap threads, showing that spiders invested equally in both types of threads. Interestingly, the magnitude of individual differences in web structure was greatest when spiders were fed ad libitum and at the beginning of web construction. We suggest that variation in web structure between spiders could be the result of stable developmental differences in morphology or genetic differences.

Keywords: animal architecture; animal personality; behavioral syndromes; extended phenotype; foraging; individual differences; Latrodectus hesperus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arac086 (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:33:y:2022:i:6:p:1170-1179.

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 ().