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Relating The Cost Of Spinning Silk To The Tendency To Share It For Three Embiids With Different Lifestyles (Order Embiidina: Clothodidae, Notoligotomidae, And Australembiidae), Janice Edgerly-Rooks, Shailesh Shenoy, Vanessa Werner

Biology

Although adult female embiids (Order Embiidina) superficially lack morphological diversity, their variety of habitats may impose distinct selective pressures on behavior, such as their use of silk and their tendency to aggregate. For example, where silk serves as a primary defense from environmental threats, coloniality might be adaptive. The cost of production or spinning might also prompt them to share silk. These ideas were tested in laboratory trials involving three species of embiids with different lifestyles: an arboreal species (Antipaluria urichi (Saussure) from a neotropical rain forest, a species (Notoligotoma hardyi (Frederichs) that dwells on surfaces of granite outcrops in …