Lai, Chih-Wei
Title
Master student (Department of Life Sciences, National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan)
Project
Evaluating prey luring performance of nocturnal Psechrus sinensis
Abstrct
Body colorations play an important role in predator-prey dynamics. Recent studies show that in some diurnal orb web spiders conspicuous body coloration can visually lure prey. In nocturnal system, the bright body color patterns of some spiders had been empirically demonstrated to function to visually lure prey. Psechrus sinensis is a nocturnal cribellate spider which has a dark body with bright ventral line, which concealed during daytime but exposed during nighttime. The webs constructed by Psechrus spiders are composed of cribellate silks and are visually very conspicuous. I wonder whether such webs could function to visually lure prey during the night and I conducted a field manipulative study on P. sinensis to test this hypothesis. There were four treatments in this study to evaluate prey luring performance of P. sinensis and its web. I manipulated the presence of P. sinensis and changed the color signal of webs by applying carbon powder. Infra-red video cameras were used to monitor the prey interception rates of P. sinensis webs in four treatments during nighttime (08:00 pm–04:00 am). I predict that both the bright body coloration and cribellate webs function as visually lure to attract insects.
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Updated: Nov-20-2020 02:10:19 (Taiwan, GMT+08:00).