Discrimination of airborne pheromones by mate-searching male western black widow spiders (<i>Latrodectus hesperus</i>): species- and population-specific responses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Males of many web-building spiders abandon their webs at maturity to search for a potential mate. Since wandering can be very risky, and females are often widely distributed, males should use any cues that might ensure rapid and accurate location of conspecific females. Although it has long been assumed that mate-searching male spiders locate females using species-specific airborne pheromones released from webs, few studies have experimentally examined this phenomenon in the field. Our results show that male western black widow spiders (Latrodectus hesperus Chamberlin and Ivie, 1935) are attracted to females' webs by an airborne cue released from the web, can distinguish between conspecific and heterospecific females, and can discriminate between webs produced by conspecific females from different geographical populations. The latter result demonstrates a partial premating block to fertilization between populations at the edges of the species range. Complementary interpopulation laboratory matings suggest that there may also be a postmating block to fertilization, as these copulations did not result in viable offspring. This study provides experimental field evidence of male attraction by airborne pheromones released from females' webs, shows the potential importance of these pheromones in species discrimination in black widow spiders, and suggests that northern and southern populations of L. hesperus may be incipient biological species.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".