Sociality level correlates with dispersal ability in spiders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary 1. The evolution of sociality alters the genetic structure of populations, often leading to an increase in the level of inbreeding and a concomitant decrease in the ratio between the benefits and costs of dispersal. 2. The association between an absence of dispersal and sociality in spiders has so far been established indirectly from the age distribution of colonies, their genetic structure and their sex ratio. Using a functional and mechanistic approach, we investigated the dispersal tendencies and abilities of individuals of both sexes in species of spiders with different degrees of sociality. We predicted that dispersal tendencies and abilities would decrease when sociality increased. 3. In seven species of Anelosimus (Theridiidae), we tested whether there is a sharp transition between dispersing subsocial species and non‐dispersing social ones, or whether dispersal ability decreases more gradually as level of sociality increases and whether both sexes are equally affected. Our assays measured the propensity and ability to bridge, a common aerial locomotion mode in spiders that is especially relevant during pre‐mating dispersal. 4. We found that the tendency to disperse by bridging and, at least in males, the ability to disperse, significantly decrease as the level of sociality increases, and that this occurs without a pronounced threshold between subsocial and social species. Additionally, we detected a reduction of leg length relative to body size with increasing sociality and decreasing dispersal abilities in males, which may be mechanistically related to their reduced ability to bridge. 5. We propose that the loss of dispersal ability associated with the evolution of sociality in spiders, especially in males, could contribute to the maintenance of their inbred social systems by substantially increasing dispersal costs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| 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 teacher head, 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".