Following up on my work on sensory priming during the past semester and this summer, I will continue running arena trials with a new generation of P. princeps in order to study the behavioral responses of jumping spiders towards visual and acoustic stimuli. My experiments consisted of introducing a jumping spider in an arena so that it walked into a viewing chamber were pictures suddenly appeared in an iPod screen. The pictures were of a wasp (a potential predator), a cricket (a preferred prey), and a beetle (a neutral stimulus). Each spider was shown one image per trial and during the sound trials a speaker played a wasp buzzing sound for 5 seconds every 2 minutes. Since the trials were run between the end of the Spring semester and this summer, it is possible that the effect of age influenced the spider’s response towards the stimuli, because jumping spiders are very visual and still they showed little response towards the pictures.
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