Among the violent loners of spiderdom, a few species evolve some family life.
, lets a cohort of youngsters hang around the home for about a year after hatching. That’s a good portion of life for spiders that live only two and a half years. One of the reasons for doing so may sound familiar: Suitable housing can be hard to find.
Rayor once thought hanging with mom was an Australian thing, but she has now learned about tolerant moms from Madagascar in aspecies. To study the evolution of traits that add up to family life in the five species, Jacob Gorneau, now at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and his Cornell colleagues used four genes from spiders in 37 huntsman genera to create the most ambitious genealogical tree yet of the family.
For instance, a form of egg sac called “plastered” — not drunk but spun like a firmly anchored splat on a surface of spider retreats — shows up inSpiders spin various shapes of outer sacs that discourage egg raiders. Spiders in a fixed retreat can conveniently anchor a sac, unlike some other moms that carry eggs with them. Also the more spread-out, plastered form might — Rayor emphasizes this is speculation — fit better in tight crevices than the puffier throw-pillow styles of egg sacs would.
Once they molt, one benefit of this family lifestyle could be table scraps for the littles. Very young spiderlings are “ridiculously small,” Rayor says, and can handle food only about the size of a fruit fly. The chance to sneak extra shreds of meat from an older sib could greatly boost nutrition. Older sibs probably would rather not share, but Rayor sees “tolerated theft.”
Cute babies may not matter to a spider mom, but maybe they should to humans. Gorneau, once “very afraid of spiders,” wants to fight the stereotype of spiders as aggressive dangers. Rayor’s spiders strike him as “stoic,” mostly sitting quietly. Rayor’s lab full of spiders in their homes, he now finds, is a “calming environment.”
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