Parasteatoda wau

Parasteatoda wau (formerly Achaeareanea wau[1]) is a species of social spider that lives around Wau, Papua New Guinea. The spider exhibits a complex dispersal behavior akin to swarming in social bees.[2] It was first described by Herb Levi, Yael Lubin, and M.H. Robinson in 1982.[3]

Parasteatoda wau
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Subphylum: Chelicerata
Class: Arachnida
Order: Araneae
Infraorder: Araneomorphae
Family: Theridiidae
Genus: Parasteatoda
Species:
P. wau
Binomial name
Parasteatoda wau
(Levi, Lubin & Robinson, 1982)[1]
Synonyms
  • Achaearanea wau

Colony structure

A P. wau colony consists of a flat, horizontal web, made of mesh silk, and a tangle of vertical silk strands forming a barrier. Insects fly into this barrier and fall to the mesh web, where the spiders capture them and feed on them.

Suspended in the vertical web are numerous curled leaves, which serve as communal retreats in which the spiders hide during inactivity throughout the day (the spiders carry out web construction and hunting at night time).[2]

Swarming behavior

After spiders in a P. wau colony mate, but before the females lay eggs, web construction activity will sharply increase as the spiders construct a straight highway of silk, about 1m wide and several meters long, away from their web. Once this web is constructed, a subset of the newly fertilized adult female spiders migrate along the highway en masse, forming a new colony, or colonies, at the end of the highway. The parent colony often still remains in place.[2]

gollark: You do it.
gollark: None of it is documentation...
gollark: I've added gregtech to my experimental modpack. JEI now contains an extra 16 pages.
gollark: The ebay one is about as good as my development machine (R3 1200 and GTX 1050) but with no dedicated GPU and 4GB of RAM.
gollark: One is a raspberry pi and one is a cheap one from ebay!

References
  1. Bern, Natural History Museum. "NMBE - World Spider Catalog". wsc.nmbe.ch. Retrieved 2018-04-13.
  2. Lubin, Yael D.; Robinson, Michael H. (1982-04-16). "Dispersal by Swarming in a Social Spider". Science. 216 (4543): 319–321. doi:10.1126/science.216.4543.319. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 17832747.
  3. Levi, H. W., Y. D. Lubin & M. H. Robinson. (1982) Two new Achaearanea species from Papua New Guinea with notes on other theridiid spiders (Araneae: Theridiidae)., Pacif. Insects 24: 105-113.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.