It’s Stormy Monday….for spiders?
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Meet Jonathan Pruitt and team from U-C Santa Barbara. They wondered if—similar to how humans rush to grocery store to hoard toilet paper—tropical cyclones make spider colonies more aggressive.
They put a piece of paper in the spider’s web and made it vibrate with a super advanced scientific tool—an electric toothbrush! They counted how many angry spiders attacked the bait, before and after a storm.
And? AFTER a cyclone, the spiders were WAY more aggressive!! More spiders went after the bait post-storm, compared to spiders with clear skies. ANGER was good. Aggressive colonies had more spiders survive into winter!
No word on if this could be helped with tiny pink umbrellas. With eight handles.
Reference: Little, A. G., Fisher, D. N., Schoener, T. W., & Pruitt, J. N. (2019). Population differences in aggression are shaped by tropical cyclone-induced selection. Nature ecology & evolution, 3(9), 1294–1297. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0951-x