Colonial web-building spiders: balancing the costs and benefits of group-living

Uetz, George W.; Hieber, Craig S.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511721953.023

Cited by 89 publications

(89 citation statements)

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“…These spiders aggregate individual orb webs but, unlike the cooperative spiders, do not cooperate in prey capture. Nonetheless, larger colonies have increased capture efficiency through the ''ricochet effect'' whereby prey items that rebound off another web are more likely to be caught (49). Tradeoffs manifest themselves in terms of position within the web complex, because spiders in the interior are less likely to be attacked by predatory wasps but are also less likely to capture prey (50).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cooperative capture of large prey solves scaling challenge faced by spider societies

Yip

Powers

Avilés

2008

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

165

145

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A decrease in the surface area per unit volume is a well known constraint setting limits to the size of organisms at both the cellular and whole-organismal levels. Similar constraints may apply to social groups as they grow in size. The communal three-dimensional webs that social spiders build function ecologically as single units that intercept prey through their surface and should thus be subject to this constraint. Accordingly, we show that web prey capture area per spider, and thus number of insects captured per capita, decreases with colony size in a neotropical social spider. Prey biomass intake per capita, however, peaks at intermediate colony sizes because the spiders forage cooperatively and larger colonies capture increasingly large insects. A peaked prey biomass intake function would explain not only why these spiders live in groups and cooperate but also why they disperse only at large colony sizes, thus addressing both sociality and colony size range in this social spider. These findings may also explain the conspicuous absence of social spiders from higher latitudes and higher elevations, areas that we have previously shown to harbor considerably fewer insects of the largest size classes than the lowland tropical rainforests where social spiders thrive. Our findings thus illustrate the relevance of scaling laws to the size and functioning of levels of organization above the individual.Anelosimus ͉ cooperation ͉ group foraging ͉ sociality ͉ allometry

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cooperative capture of large prey solves scaling challenge faced by spider societies

Yip

Powers

Avilés

2008

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

165

145

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…If so, kin-recognition systems might be necessary and common to all social spiders. The unequal distribution bene¢ts within a group is common to other social taxa that have open groups, especially vertebrates (Trivers 1985;Emlen 1997), social insects (Seger 1991), and colonial orb-weaving spiders (Uetz & Hieber 1997). More extreme experimental methods on social spiders may ¢nd other similar cases of kin discrimination in otherwise apparently peaceful groups.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kin recognition in a social spider

Evans

1999

Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B

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Social spiders accept immigrant spiders into their kin-based groups, suggesting that spiders cannot recognize kin and may lose inclusive ¢tness bene¢ts. A ¢eld and two laboratory experiments on Diaea ergandros, a social crab spider, demonstrated that younger and older instar D. ergandros do discriminate siblings, but potential bene¢ts were variable and not equally distributed. First, proportional survival was greater in large groups regardless of the within-group relatedness, so accepting immigrants increases probability of group survival (although relatedness was more important among smaller groups). Second, juvenile D. ergandros ate unrelated spiders instead of siblings when starved, so immigrants might represent a food reserve in times of food shortage. Third, subadult resident, sibling females cannibalized unrelated, immigrant females and their brothers instead of immigrant males when starved, suggesting that subadult female spiders may maximize outbreeding opportunities. These bene¢ts provide selective pressure for groups to accept immigrants, but as bene¢ts are realized di¡erentially, con£ict and cooperation will exist within spider groups similar to that shown in other group-living taxa.

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“…It means that there is a condition under which cooperation occurs unless interacting individuals are non-kin. The cases reported in paper wasps (Ito^ 1984;1993), many species of communal spiders (Fowler and Gobbi 1988;Uetz and Hieber 1997) and termites (Matsura et al 2002) may partly correspond to this condition. Furthermore inequality 3 clearly indicates that males' relatedness is also important, namely r is the primary determinant of the evolution of cooperation, if 1<a<2.…”

Section: Condition Of Cooperationmentioning

confidence: 93%

Where does male‐to‐male “aggression” compromise “cooperation”?

Saitô

Mori

2005

Population Ecology

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We discussed how the diverse nature of aggression and cooperation is understandable, if we focus our attention on where aggression reaches a compromise with peace and/or cooperation in response to the relatedness between interactors. First we addressed whether the Hamilton's rule is applicable for explaining the variation of male-to-male aggressiveness. Next we showed that the variation in aggression and cooperation known in males of social spider mites (Saito 1995) is explainable from the change of relatedness (i.e. inclusive fitness) and effect of cooperative defense (synergistic effect). Then we learned there is a sufficient condition of cooperation which is determined primarily by two factors; the relatedness and synergistic effect of males. Furthermore, we expect that there is a condition where the aggression between males varies depending upon the relatedness close to the sufficient condition of cooperation. Problems focused onAnimal cooperation and aggression are two fundamental themes that have attracted numerous sociobiologists so far (Wilson 1975;Alcock 1979;Maynard Smith 1982a;Trivers 1985; Krebs and Davis 1987;Dugatkin 1997). However, both have been treated as separate phenomena to be focused on from the view of sociobiology. For example, Wilson (1975) discussed "cooperative breeding" in chapter 5 and "aggression" in the chapter 11 of his seminal book "Sociobiology". Dugatkin (1997) 's review of animal cooperation also discussed these phenomena separately, even though the game theory reasoning about cooperation with kin-ship (Hines and Maynard Smith 1979;Grafen 1979) involves a bud of new ideas to treat these phenomena inclusively.However, several doubts remain over how the increase of inclusive fitness through cooperation between relatives (kin selection) influences individual fitness through resource competition between them (individual selection), and where (and when) these two extremes compromise in group living animals (Maynard Smith 1982b;Queller 1985;West et al. 2001;Glron et al. 2004)? Such questions may be related to a tendency to start any focus on the evolution of aggression or cooperation "from neutral to highly aggressive behaviors" or "from neutral to highly cooperative ones" in group living animals, and not from aggression to cooperation. Another related problem is that interactions between individuals in the context of social evolution have been considered a priori to be phenomena in "group forming" animals, even though most animals are in a continuum from solitary to group living, and there are few animals that live "solitary" throughout their life-times (Krause and Ruxton 2002). 1We feel that such fragmentary views have sometimes rendered the rule(s) underlying aggression and cooperation in animals indistinct. Hereafter, whenever possible, we consider aggression and cooperation to be a continuous trait in group living animals, and solitary and group living (≥2) to be distinct traits in order to make the discussion clearer. We then attempt to discuss how aggression and coop...

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Colonial web-building spiders: balancing the costs and benefits of group-living

Cited by 89 publications

References 0 publications

Cooperative capture of large prey solves scaling challenge faced by spider societies

Cooperative capture of large prey solves scaling challenge faced by spider societies

Kin recognition in a social spider

Where does male‐to‐male “aggression” compromise “cooperation”?

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