Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 81, Issue 4, April 2011, Pages 749-755
Animal Behaviour

Sexual cannibalism in the European garden spider Araneus diadematus: the roles of female hunger and mate size dimorphism

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.01.005Get rights and content

Sexual cannibalism, in particular before insemination, is a long-standing evolutionary paradox because it persists despite extreme costs for the victim, usually the male. Several adaptive and nonadaptive hypotheses have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, but empirical studies are still scarce and results are inconclusive. We studied the spider Araneus diadematus in which females may attack and kill potential mates at any time during courtship or mating, making the species ideal for examining the causes of pre- and postinsemination sexual cannibalism. We manipulated food availability for females and conducted mating trials in the laboratory to test predictions derived from two hypotheses: the adaptive female foraging (AFF) hypothesis, which views sexual cannibalism as an optimal female behaviour in the face of a trade-off between mating and cannibalizing a courting male; and the mate size dimorphism (MSD) hypothesis, which postulates a physical advantage of larger females in subduing males. We found partial support for the AFF hypothesis, but MSD explained sexual cannibalism irrespective of the timing of cannibalism. Our results suggest that a complex interplay of female state, mate choice and physical dominance is responsible for the maintenance of sexual cannibalism against male interests.

Section snippets

General Protocol

Juveniles and subadults of A. diadematus were collected in June and July 2005 from their orb webs in gardens and in hedges around meadows in a rural area of northern Germany (Tornesch, Schleswig-Holstein; 53°41′17N, 9°43′58E). Spiders were housed individually in 200 ml transparent plastic cups in our laboratory at the University of Hamburg. Small juveniles were fed a diet of Drosophila twice a week and larger juveniles and adult spiders were fed two or three Calliphora flies twice a week. Adult

Preinsemination Attacks

The frequency of female attacks prior to copulation was 42.9% (76/177 cases). Female age, encounter number, male mass, male size and male age did not significantly affect the attack probability (Table 2). However, female mating status, female/male size ratio, male mating status and female feeding status had significant (additive) effects on the likelihood of attack. Starved females were more likely than fed females to attack a male and mated females attacked more often than virgins (Fig. 1a, b

Discussion

Our experiments confirmed that both satiation and mating status affected female aggressiveness in the direction predicted by the AFF hypothesis (Newman & Elgar 1991): males were most likely to be attacked by a starved and mated female. However, contrary to the prediction of the AFF hypothesis, the presumed trade-off between foraging and mating was not mediated by a higher capture success prior to mating in comparison to after mating. On the contrary, we found that preinsemination capture

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Mark Briffa, Matthias W. Foellmer, Lutz Fromhage and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on the manuscript.

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    S. Pekár is at the Department of Botany and Zoology, Faculty of Sciences, Masaryk University, Kotlarska 2, 611 37 Brno, Czech Republic.

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