Dodging sexual conflict?—Sub‐adult females of a web‐building spider stay cryptic to mate‐seeking adult males
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Adult males of web‐building spiders often cohabit the webs of sessile sub‐adult (i.e. penultimate instar) females and mate with them as they moult to adults. Often, males accrue benefits from this cohabitation (kleptoparasitism, avoidance of cannibalism, potential polygamy), whereas sub‐adult females may either accrue benefits or incur costs such as curtailed opportunity for mate choice or mate cannibalism. Working with the false black widow spider, Steatoda grossa, we tested the hypothesis that webs of sub‐adult females, unlike those of virgin adult females, lack sex attractant pheromone that mate‐seeking males could detect and exploit for mate location. We tested our hypothesis in laboratory experiments by presenting adult males with binary choices between different types of webs (e.g., webs of adult virgin females, sub‐adult females or sub‐adult males), and methanol extracts of these webs. Males spent more time on webs, or web extracts, of adult virgin females than on webs or web extracts of any other type. Most males (95%) also displayed courtship only on webs, or web extracts, of adult virgin females. Our data demonstrate apparent semiochemical crypsis of sub‐adult females or their webs to mate‐seeking adult males that seem to find sub‐adult females by chance encounter. This crypsis is likely adaptive to sub‐adult females that are in sexual conflict with adult males cohabiting their webs.
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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) | 0.002 | 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".