Social spiders that group together into colonies tend to divide the labor by personality, researchers said in a new study.
Looking at females of the Anelosimus studiosus species, scientists observed two distinct personality types among the spiders, watching how 141 aggressive and 148 docile female spiders worked at different tasks, Live Science reported.
Comb spiders, which live throughout the Americas, seem to divvy up jobs such as hunting prey and caring for young spiders based on whether a female spider is aggressive or docile. The males of the species don't do much other than mate with the females.
"[Male spiders] do not display the same personality differences as do females, and they do not perform essential colony functions--such as web repair, colony defense, prey capture or brood care--like females do," said lead study author Colin Wright, as quoted by Live Science. "That is why this study, and just about every study with this species, focuses on the females."
Besides analyzing the individual spiders, researchers created 60 laboratory colonies, each of which included two aggressive and two docile female spiders. The team found that individual aggressive spiders were twice as effective at catching prey compared with the docile spiders, while aggressive females in colonies were three times more likely to mend webs, go after prey and defend the colony against invader spiders.
On the other hand, individual docile spiders were better at caring for offspring, which were twice as likely to survive if raised by docile females compared with aggressive females. Egg sacs have to be guarded and young spiderlings have to be fed regurgitated food from mature spiders.
"We were surprised at how good of parents docile spiders turned out to be," Wright said. "They're much better parents than aggressive spiders."
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