Aphids are major pests in apple orchards, debilitating the crop and spreading disease. We investigated whether early-season predation by canopy spiders may be effectively controlling aphid numbers in three organic orchards. For this purpose, we monitored the aphid population dynamics from the winter eggs to colony stages and compared this to spider abundances and rates of predation on aphids de...

A psychophysical paradigm for investigating unconscious perception was used to test the hypothesis of dissociation between detection and identification of phobic stimuli. Spider-phobic and non-phobic participants were presented with masked images of spiders and flowers and an equal number of control stimuli in a random sequence. After each masked stimulus was flashed, participants first reporte...

More than 40,000 species of spiders have been identified in the world. Spider bites is a common problem among people, however few of them are harmful but delay in treatment can cause death. Since the spider bites are risk full to human, they should be taken seriously, especially in endemic areas. Our objective in this review was to study about poisonous spiders and find out treatments of them. ...

Correlated evolution of traits can act synergistically to facilitate organism function. But, what happens when constraints exist on the evolvability of some traits, but not others? The orb web was a key innovation in the origin of >12,000 species of spiders. Orb evolution hinged upon the origin of novel spinning behaviors and innovations in silk material properties. In particular, a new major a...

Spiders commonly disperse on silk lines as juveniles by means of rappelling or ballooning. These modes dispersal, especially long-distance dispersal via ballooning, can greatly increase the distance an individual move and, at population level, speed range expansion and likelihood gene flow. Nevertheless, few studies have examined how spiders under field conditions, which environmental meteorolo...

The courtship behavior of the semi-aquatic Pisaurid fishing spider Dolomedes fimbriatus was examined in the laboratory . Male courtship was triggered by the presence of female drag-lines, presumably b y a female sex pheromone since males did not respond with courtship to male drag-lines . Male courtship behavior included vibratory signaling (water surface waves), leg-waving, and following femal...

We develop a mathematical model for understanding the effect of wanderer spiders as biological controllers of the insects infesting vineyards, thus accounting also for the role played by residual wood and green patches as spiders habitat in the otherwise homogeneuous landscape of the Langhe region. We then extend the deterministic model allowing random fluctuations around the coexistence equili...

Crab-spiders (Thomisus onustus) positioned for hunting on flowers disguise themselves by assuming the same colour as the flower, a strategy that is assumed to fool both bird predators and insect prey. But although this mimicry is obvious to the human observer, it has never been examined with respect to different visual systems. Here we show that when female crab-spiders mimic different flower s...

This article describes the clinical progression of symptoms over a period of 5 days of a bite inflicted by a Philodromus sp. spider. Commonly known as 'running spiders', these are not considered to be harmful to humans. This report, however, is the first description of an actual bite by a member of this group of spiders showing cytotoxic envenomation. Management of the bites should be as recomm...

The slit sense organs (SSOs) of spiders are mechanoreceptors measuring strains in the cuticle (Barth, 1978). They were discovered by Bertkau (1878) and studied quite intensively by many authors in the following decades (review in Barth, 1967). They are stimulated by a compression perpendicular to the long axis of the slit (Barth, 1972a,b, 1973). The fine structure of slit sensilla is well known...