{"id":189026,"date":"2024-12-05T14:12:50","date_gmt":"2024-12-05T14:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/12\/05\/climate-stress-may-undermine-male-spiders-romantic-gift-giving\/"},"modified":"2024-12-05T14:12:50","modified_gmt":"2024-12-05T14:12:50","slug":"climate-stress-may-undermine-male-spiders-romantic-gift-giving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/12\/05\/climate-stress-may-undermine-male-spiders-romantic-gift-giving\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate stress may undermine male spiders\u2019 romantic gift giving"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"763\" height=\"456\" src=\"https:\/\/i3.wp.com\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/survey_cta_footprint.jpg?fit=763,456&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"Climate stress may undermine male spiders\u2019 romantic gift giving\" title=\"Climate stress may undermine male spiders\u2019 romantic gift giving\" \/><\/div> \r\n<br><div data-component=\"video-embed\">\n\t\t\t\t\n\n\n\n\n<p>Courtship dazzle in spiders can lose some zing in uncertain climates. Males in places with hard-to-predict rain and temperatures devolve into suitors who woo mostly with cheap, useless gifts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Researchers have described <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/prevent-cannibalism-bring-chocolate\">gift giving in courtship<\/a> in only 15 or 20 of the world\u2019s more than 50,000 known species of spiders, says evolutionary biologist Maria Jos\u00e9 Albo of Universidad La Rep\u00fablica in Montevideo, Uruguay (<em>SN: 7\/26\/16). <\/em>Since 2015, she and her lab have focused on spiders that flirt mostly in evenings and nights among the rocks and pebbles of rivers of Uruguay and southern Brazil.<\/p>\n\n\n<aside class=\"sn-conversion rich-text rich-text--with-sidebar\">\n<style><![CDATA[\n.email-conversion {\n  border: 1px solid #ffcccb;\n  color: white;\n  margin-top: 50px;\n  background-image: url(\"\/wp-content\/themes\/sciencenews\/client\/src\/images\/cta-module@2x.jpg\");\n  padding: 20px;\n  clear: both;\n}\n\n]]><\/style>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"rich-text embedded-conversion-content is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/forms\/d\/e\/1FAIpQLSf83OekELCTbhuYw3Iu-p8OWiE9-uE56ZFNbeTapotBaa1rIg\/viewform?usp=sf_link\">\n  <\/a><\/div><a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/forms\/d\/e\/1FAIpQLSf83OekELCTbhuYw3Iu-p8OWiE9-uE56ZFNbeTapotBaa1rIg\/viewform?usp=sf_link\">\n<\/a>\n\n<style><![CDATA[\n#dynamic-conversion {\n  border: 1px solid #ffcccb;\n  max-width: 100%;\n  height: auto;\n  clear: both;\n}\n]]><\/style>\n\n\n\n\n<\/aside>\n\n\n<p>When the brown male <em>Paratrechalea ornata<\/em> senses a female to woo, he picks some object to spin silk around for courtship presentation. Males\u2019 bodies are only about the size of peppercorns suspended on legs, so the presents are \u201cvery, very small,\u201d Albo says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The best of these gifts are nuggets of fresh insect meat a female can feed on while a male inserts sperm.\u00a0The more time she spends opening and eating her gift, the more sperm he can deliver. That abundance could help as sperm in her reproductive tract from various males compete for dad-hood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it was surprising when, while monitoring spider silk-wrapped gifts at six locations in Uruguay and Brazil, Albo and colleagues found some pitiful snacks on offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The first Albo opened was \u2026 a seed. That\u2019s useless for a spider. Their mouthparts work more like milkshake straws, but for meat-shakes. Over years of monitoring courtship gifts, Albo and colleagues have found a bunch of equally unsnackable presents: broken shards of insect exoskeletons, bits of plant stems and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At two study sites, more than half the gifts analyzed were <a href=\"https:\/\/www.journals.uchicago.edu\/doi\/10.1086\/732308\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">inedible silk-wrapped trash<\/a>, Albo and colleagues report in <em>The American Naturalist<\/em> November issue. What these two trash-gift zones for courtship had in common, the researchers say, is low predictability in rainfall and temperature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In places with more surprises and stresses, perhaps with more floods or out-of-whack insect-prey cycles, spiders have many other challenges. So maybe what\u2019s wrapped up inside competitive gifts just isn\u2019t as important anymore. Gifting persists, but sexual selection based on what\u2019s inside has \u201crelaxed,\u201d as biologists put it. Among the many implications, Albo says, the weakening of a courtship signal \u201cshows how variation in climate, can affect something very essential \u2014 which is reproduction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Also, it\u2019s \u201cdefinitely possible\u201d that the mercurial weather could change not just contents of males\u2019 gifts but the important silk wrapping, says behavioral ecologist Michelle Beyer, of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit\u00e4t M\u00fcnchen in Germany. She wasn\u2019t part of the South American study but works with Europe\u2019s best-known gift-giving counterpart, the nursery web spider <em>Pisaura mirabilis<\/em>. Gift-giving males of species on both continents dope their silk with compounds that in some way enhance fatherhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s definitely possible,\u201d she says, that rain or high temperatures could change the composition of the silk as well as the length of time the males\u2019 doping compounds last on it. Plus, the silk road of information runs both ways. Research is already under way on the female silk of the European species, she says, to see if spinnings by heat-stressed females maintain their usual appeal to males.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n<br>\r\n<br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/climate-stress-male-spiders-gift-giving\">Source link <\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Courtship dazzle in spiders can lose some zing in uncertain climates. Males in places with hard-to-predict rain and temperatures devolve into suitors who woo mostly with cheap, useless gifts. Researchers have described gift giving in courtship in only 15 or 20 of the world\u2019s more than 50,000 known species of spiders, says evolutionary biologist Maria [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189027,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/survey_cta_footprint.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[606],"tags":[486,6672,17655,902,51253,30185,6660,13319],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189026"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189026"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":189028,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189026\/revisions\/189028"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}