A meal or a male: the 'whispers' of black widow males do not trigger a predatory response in females.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Female spiders are fine-tuned to detect and quickly respond to prey vibrations, presenting a challenge to courting males who must attract a female's attention but not be mistaken for prey. This is likely particularly important at the onset of courtship when a male enters a female's web. In web-dwelling spiders, little is known about how males solve this conundrum, or about their courtship signals. Here we used laser Doppler vibrometry to study the vibrations produced by males and prey (house flies and crickets) on tangle webs of the western black widow Latrodectus hesperus and on sheet webs of the hobo spider Tegenaria agrestis. We recorded the vibrations at the location typically occupied by a hunting female spider. We compared the vibrations produced by males and pre

SUBMITTER: Vibert S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3909478 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature