Maternal effects on egg investment and offspring performance in black widow spiders
Section snippets
Study System
Black widow sibships begin as a mass of eggs encased within a silken eggsac (D'Amour et al., 1936, Kaston, 1970). Field collections of eggsacs from both urban Phoenix and undisturbed Sonoran desert habitat yield a range of egg numbers, from 175 to 300 eggs per eggsac (Johnson et al., 2012). Individual eggs hatch within the eggsac after approximately 14 days (Kaston, 1970), followed by prelarval and larval periods during which they are immobile in the eggsac (Foelix, 1996). Following the larval
Methods
Eighteen penultimate-stage juvenile female black widows were collected from urban Phoenix populations in the first week of June 2008 and transported to the laboratory. Upon collection, spiders were weighed (mg) and had their cephalothorax photographed with a digital camera. These images included a reference scale allowing us to later digitally measure the area of the cephalothorax (mm2) using the program Imagepro. Female weights were obtained every other day throughout the experiment, and
Effects on Maternal Traits
MANOVA indicated that our manipulation of maternal food availability had a significant positive effect on a suite of maternal variables (F6,12 = 11.2, P < 0.0001). Specifically, as summarized in Table 1 and depicted in Fig. 1, heightened maternal food availability significantly improved female body condition (F1,17 = 79.9, R2 = 0.825, P < 0.0001; Fig. 1a), eggsac mass (F1,17 = 41.9, R2 = 0.712, P < 0.0001; Fig. 1b) and egg number (F1,17 = 26.5, R2 = 0.609, P < 0.0001; Fig. 1c). Indeed, these three traditional
Discussion
Our results indicate that female fecundity, egg size, egg mass, egg density and spiderling development speed are all significantly influenced by a mother's feeding history. Egg parameters, development speed and sibling cannibalism also proved to be significantly predicted by family of origin, indicating that after accounting for food treatment effects, within-family variation in these traits is dwarfed by variation among families (e.g. Fig. 2). Below we discuss the implications of these
Acknowledgments
We thank Jennifer Broatch for statistical guidance. Financial assistance was made available from the National Science Foundation (NSF-CAP3: BCS-1026865).
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