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      Unique behavioural modifications in the web structure of the cave orb spider Meta menardi (Araneae, Tetragnathidae)

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      Scientific Reports
      Nature Publishing Group UK
      Behavioural ecology, Animal behaviour, Entomology

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          Abstract

          In the last decade there has been a renewed interest in the study of behavioural adaptations to environmental constraints with a focus on adaptations to challenging habitats due to their reduced ecological complexity. However, behavioural studies on organisms adapted to nutrient poor subterranean habitats are few and far between. Here, we compared both morphological traits, in terms of relative leg lengths, and behavioural traits, captured in the geometry of the spider web, between the cave-dwelling spider, Meta menardi, and two aboveground species from the same family (Tetragnathidae); Metellina mengei and Tetragnatha montana. We found that the webs of the cave spider differed significantly from the two surface-dwelling species. The most dramatic difference was the lack of frame threads with the radii in the webs instead attaching directly to the surrounding rock, but other differences in relative web size, web asymmetry and number of capture spiral threads were also found. We argue that these modifications are likely to be adaptations to allow for a novel foraging behaviour to additionally capture walking prey within the vicinity of the web. We found only limited evidence for morphological adaptations and suggest that the cave orb spider could act as a model organism for studies of behaviour in energy-poor environments.

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          Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Usinglme4

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            The Role of Behavior in the Evolution of Spiders, Silks, and Webs

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                thomas.hesselberg@zoo.ox.ac.uk
                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group UK (London )
                2045-2322
                8 January 2021
                8 January 2021
                2021
                : 11
                : 92
                Affiliations
                GRID grid.4991.5, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 8948, Department of Zoology, , University of Oxford, ; Oxford, OX1 2PS UK
                Article
                79868
                10.1038/s41598-020-79868-w
                7794372
                33420121
                ab1a8290-17cf-4b64-acf5-d72b8c15e912
                © The Author(s) 2021

                Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 9 August 2020
                : 9 December 2020
                Categories
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                © The Author(s) 2021

                Uncategorized
                behavioural ecology,animal behaviour,entomology
                Uncategorized
                behavioural ecology, animal behaviour, entomology

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