Mousy Cats and Sheepish Coyotes by John Shivik

Author:John Shivik [Shivik, John A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7152-6
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2017-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

When we think of social animals, those living in herds and communities, we think of species such as horses, wolves, or humans. Then, we think about the opposites, solitary animals that tolerate each other only infrequently, perhaps once a year to mate, such as bears or wolverines. Perhaps we don’t even think about the lives of insects and arachnids, but we ought to. Worlds of behavior and cooperation occur in species far different from Homo sapiens, and if we are going to give animals credit, it shouldn’t be due only to their charisma and humanlike emotional proclivities.

Think again about spiders. The voracious little eight-eyed web builders may seem like a strange assemblage of animals within which to go looking for personality, but they not only have individual personalities, as we’ve seen in previous chapters, they also create complex cultures.

Susan Riechert and Thomas Jones were a pair of the early explorers traipsing around the Everglades in the mid-2000s and investigating the mystery of variability in spider sociality. Road tripping, they journeyed from the southern tip of Florida up through Alabama and into Tennessee and collected twenty-five nests of the spider Anelosimus studious from various locations along the north-south transect of the three states. The peregrinating investigators took measurements of length, width, and height of each nest and identified the inhabitants within them for individual study.

One thing was immediately apparent. Spiders from the northern, higher latitudes lived communally. They formed colonies that sometimes contained hundreds of females. Southern spiders of the same species, however, lived solely, in solitary webs away from others. The north to south effect was strong, with 71 percent of the variation in colony size being explained by how far north the spiders lived.3 The spiders from the different locations had different cultures.

What caused the observed differences? How did the spiders from each location create a different set of social rules for interacting with each other? Riechert and Jones tested their subjects by putting two spiders at a time in a box and then watching to see if the spiders would huddle in the same corner or separate. Sometimes, there were two spiders from different solitary nests. Other times they placed two females from the same big colony. Last, they mixed two females from different colonies together. To determine if the personality differences were genetically linked, the scientist tested laboratory-reared babies too.

Sure enough, the southern spiders tended to be loners. When put into the same box, they usually retreated to opposite corners. The spiders from the higher latitudes, whether from the same nest or not, were attracted to stay in the same corner together. Riechert and Jones looked more closely at the individual spiders and determined that the choices of individuals were what powered the formation of whole societies, and other important behavioral aspects were at work too.4 They noticed a relationship between the social to solo continuum and the tendency to travel: individuals that dispersed from communal nests dispersed shorter distances.

Was it actually spider personality, something inheritable, or

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