Seminar

Today’s seminar, lectured by Fiona Cross, involved insight from studies done on behavioral strategies of jumping spiders. While doing research here, she mostly paid attention to Portia Africana, a tiny species of spider with incredible cognitive abilities when you consider its brain is smaller than a thumbtack. Results from the studies done with Portia revealed that it displays acts of specialized behavior with several strategies that allow it to be so versatile. For example, Fiona described how throughout her studies, Portia paid attention to prey type and prey number with each consecutive trial using lures. Portia would hesitate to approach prey if there were less of them, and would find no interest in leaves used as the alternative lure in the trials it was subjected to. I also learned some interesting facts about Portia compared to other species of spider: One of them was that compared to Nephila Clavipes, Portia’s eyesight is superior. An even better, more interesting fact about Portia I learned was its aggressive behavior using mimicry as a strategy to lure and attack other spiders. Portia, when encountering other spider nests, will pretend to act like a helpless insect stuck on the web by mimicking the vibrations of a struggling bug. When the other spider approaches closely enough, Portia will attack and eat the spider. Because of how interesting this last piece of information was before she closed the seminar, a future proposal for an experiment involving Portia could be its frequency of aggressive mimicry with live spiders of a different species compared to its own species (because Portia is also known to display acts of cannibalism).