Abstract
Adult body size, development time, and growth rates are components of organismal life histories, which crucially influence fitness and are subject to trade-offs. If selection is sex-specific, male and female developments can eventually lead to different optimal sizes. This can be achieved through developmental plasticity and sex-specific developmental trajectories. Spiders present suitable animals to study differences in developmental plasticity and life history trade-offs between the sexes, because of their pronounced sexual dimorphism. Here, we examine variation in life histories in the extremely sexually size dimorphic African hermit spider (Nephilingis cruentata) reared under standardized laboratory conditions. Females average 70 times greater body mass (and greater body size) at maturity than males, which they achieve by developing longer and growing faster. We find a small to moderate amount of variability in life history traits to be caused by family effects, comprising genetic, maternal, and early common environmental effects, suggesting considerable plasticity in life histories. Remarkably, family effects explain a higher variance in male compared to female life histories, implying that female developmental trajectories may be more responsive to environment. We also find sex differences in life history trade-offs and show that males with longer development times grow larger but exhibit shorter adult longevity. Female developmental time also correlates positively with adult body mass, but the trade-offs between female adult mass, reproduction, and longevity are less clear. We discuss the implications of these findings in the light of evolutionary trade-offs between life history traits.
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The authors were supported by the Slovenian Research Agency (grants P1-0236, P1-0255, J1-9163).
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Conceptualization, ideas and formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims: Simona Kralj-Fišer (SKF).
Field work and specimen acquisition: Matjaž Kuntner (MK), Charles R. Haddad (CRH), Matjaž Gregorič (MG), Tjaša Lokovšek (TL), Klemen Čandek (KČ), and Shakira Quinones (SQ).
Animal rearing: lead, Rok Golobinek (RG); equal, TL, Eva Turk (ET), Janko Šet (JŠ), and SKF; support, MG and SQ.
Data curation, management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data, and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use: RG, JŠ, TL, and SKF.
Formal analysis, application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesize study data: ET.
Funding acquisition, acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication: SKF and MK.
Investigation, conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection: lead, SKF; equal, RG, ET, JŠ, and TL.
Methodology, development or design of methodology, and creation of models: SKF and ET.
Project administration, management, and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution: SKF.
Supervision, oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team: SKF.
Validation, verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs: SKF.
Visualization, preparation, creation, and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation: ET (graphs, tables) and MG (photo).
Writing — original draft, preparation, creation, and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation): SKF, ET, and JŠ.
Writing — review and editing: JŠ, ET, RG, TL, MG, SQ, CRH, KČ, MK, and SKF.
Preparation, creation, and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary, or revision, including pre- or post-publication stages: SKF.
Revision: ET and SKF.
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Research on spiders is not restricted by the animal welfare law of the country where the study was conducted. In the field, we collected the minimum number of individuals needed to conduct the research. The spiders were kept in conditions similar to their natural environmental conditions. The spiders were regularly fed with different prey items. The study was non-invasive. After the experiments, the spiders remained in the laboratory and were reared until natural death, as described above.
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Janko Šet, and Eva Turk contributed equally to this work
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Šet, J., Turk, E., Golobinek, R. et al. Sex-specific developmental trajectories in an extremely sexually size dimorphic spider. Sci Nat 108, 54 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-021-01754-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-021-01754-w