We presented our research on sexual behaviour of spiders exhibiting unusual sexual strategies, such as mate binding, genital plugging, emasculation, sexual cannibalism, opportunistic mating, traumatic insemination, etc.
F.35 Other
COBISS.SI-ID: 35478317In interview I explained to general public our studies of sexual behaviour in spider Nephilengys malabarensis (refs: Kral jFišer et al. 2011: Eunuchs are better fighters; Lee et al. 2012: Emasculation : glovesoff strategy enhances eunuch spider endurance; Li et al. 2012: Remote copulation).
B.06 Other
COBISS.SI-ID: 35478573I presented the conclusions from my post-doctoral project. Spiders dwelling in cities have relatively faster generation turn-over and higher reproductive success, and exhibit higher developmental plasticity; they are relatively bolder and more active in novel environment; probably they also show higher intra-species tolerance. The latter needs to be further studied.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 36883501Sexual cannibalism is a rare phenomenon in animal world, but common in several spider species. It has been explained by many hypotheses, e.g. female hunger and mate choice. Precopulatory cannibalism, where virgin females devour males before mating, is more puzzling to explain, because it may bring no benefit to either sex. In his seminal paper, Goran Arnqvist (1997) proposed that precopulatory cannibalism represents a spillover of female aggressiveness from the juvenile foraging context, when aggressiveness is advantageous, to the adult mating context, when aggressiveness may be nonadaptive or mal adaptive; this is socalled “aggressivespillover hypothesis=ASH”. In other words, individuals exhibit limited plasticity in aggressive behaviours because they are genetically canalized for indiscriminate aggressiveness towards prey and conspecifics, including males. Hence, a tendency to employ precopulatory cannibalism is supposed to be a part of the female aggression syndrome, an assertion generally accepted in the personality field. We found serious caveats in ASH and therefore re evaluated findings reporting support for ASH. While the ASH explains precopulatory cannibalism solely based on female aggressiveness, we conclude that other factors may work in concert with personality, such as female hunger level, mate size dimorphism, mate behaviour and quality. Cannibalistic females have never been found to experience curtailed fitness as predicted by ASH. We warned to consider ASH more critically and propose further directions. The review was published in Ethology and already received two answers both agreeing and explaining their view where differ
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 36269613