Several studies have demonstrated that competition between disparate taxa can be important in determining community structure, yet surprisingly, to our knowledge, no quantitative studies have been conducted on competition between carnivorous plants and animals. To examine potential competition between these taxa, we studied dietary and microhabitat overlap between pink sundews (Drosera capillar...

Ballooning, the aerial displacement of a spider caused by friction between air and the spide r with its silk, has considerable ecological importance but remains poorly understood as a mechanical process . The studies reported here provide insight into the mechanics of ballooning by way of experiments involving (1 ) stroboscopic measurement of the rates of fall of spiders slowed by known lengths...

At first, there were explosions. Neurobiologists investigating the peculiar behavior of the jumping spider sought to record its neurons. But the scientists’method always spelled doom for the creatures: peeling back the spiders’ exoskeleton to expose the brain caused vital fluids to burst forth. For decades, neurobiologists and ecologists have struggled to understand just how the poppy seed-size...

Humans quickly detect the presence of evolutionary threats through visual perception. Many theorists have considered humans to be predisposed to respond to both snakes and spiders as evolutionarily fear-relevant stimuli. Evidence supports that human adults, children, and snake-naive monkeys all detect pictures of snakes among pictures of flowers more quickly than vice versa, but recent neurophy...

Fishing spiders (Pisauridae) frequent the surfaces of ponds and streams and thereby expose themselves to predation by a variety of aquatic and semi-aquatic vertebrates. To assess the possibility that the impressive jumps of fishing spiders from the water surface function in evading attacks by frogs, attacks by bullfrogs (Rana catesbiana) and green frogs (R. clamitans) on Dolomedes triton were s...

More than 80 incidences of fish predation by semi-aquatic spiders--observed at the fringes of shallow freshwater streams, rivers, lakes, ponds, swamps, and fens--are reviewed. We provide evidence that fish predation by semi-aquatic spiders is geographically widespread, occurring on all continents except Antarctica. Fish predation by spiders appears to be more common in warmer areas between 40° ...

Bright body colorations of orb-weaving spiders have been hypothesized to be attractive to insects and thus function to increase foraging success. However, the color signals of these spiders are also considered to be similar to those of the vegetation background, and thus the colorations function to camouflage the spiders. In this study, we evaluated these 2 hypotheses by field experiments and b...

spiders are one of the most abundant invertebrates in terrestrial ecosystems that have a good potential to pest control in crops. species richness and abundance of spiders and the effects of different agricultural practices on these predators were studied in winter wheat fields in shirvan, mashhad and gonabad, cities in northeast of iran. in each region, high and low input fields of winter whea...

Much of an animal's health status, life history, and behavior are dictated by interactions with its endogenous and exogenous bacterial communities. Unfortunately, interactions between hosts and members of their resident bacterial community are often ignored in animal behavior and behavioral ecology. Here, we aim to identify the nature of host-microbe interactions in a nonmodel organism, the Afr...

The rates of oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide release of primitive hunters and weaver spiders, the Chilean Recluse spider Loxosceles laeta Nicolet (Araneae: Sicariidae) and the Chilean Tiger spider Scytodes globula Nicolet (Araneae: Scytodidae), are analyzed, and their relationship with body mass is studied. The results are compared with the metabolic data available for other spiders. A lo...