title: Spider web and silk performance landscapes across nutrient space.
abstract: Predators have been shown to alter their foraging as a regulatory response to recent feeding history, but it remains unknown whether trap building predators modulate their traps similarly as a regulatory strategy. Here we fed the orb web spider Nephila pilipes either live crickets, dead crickets with webs stimulated by flies, or dead crickets without web stimulation, over 21 days to enforce spiders to differentially extract nutrients from a single prey source. In addition to the nutrients extracted we measured web architectures, silk tensile properties, silk amino acid compositions, and web tension after each feeding round. We then plotted web and silk "performance landscapes" across nutrient space. The landscapes had multiple peaks and troughs for each web and silk performance parameter. The findings suggest that N. pilipes plastically adjusts the chemical and physical properties of their web and silk in accordance with its nutritional history. Our study expands the application of the geometric framework foraging model to include a type of predatory trap. Whether it can be applied to other predatory traps requires further testing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Life Science, Tunghai University, Taichung 40704, Taiwan.|Evolution &Ecology Research Centre, School of Biological, Earth &Environmental Sciences, The University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia.
authors.forename: Sean J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Blamires
authors.affiliation: Department of Life Science, National Chung-Hsing University, Taichung 40227, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Yi-Hsuan
authors.initials: YH
authors.lastname: Tseng
authors.affiliation: Center for Measurement Standards, Industrial Technology Research Institute, Hsinchu 30011, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Chung-Lin
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Department of BioScience, Building 1540, Aarhus University, Ny Munkegade 116, DK-Aarhus 8000 C, Denmark.
authors.forename: Søren
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Toft
authors.affiliation: The Charles Perkins Centre, Faculty of Veterinary Science &School of Biological Sciences, The University of Sydney, Sydney NSW 2006, Australia.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Raubenheimer
authors.affiliation: Department of Life Science, Tunghai University, Taichung 40704, Taiwan.|Department of Life Science, National Chung-Hsing University, Taichung 40227, Taiwan.
authors.forename: I-Min
authors.initials: IM
authors.lastname: Tso
mesh_terms: D000596:Amino Acids / Q000032:analysis; D000818:Animals; D005247:Feeding Behavior; D005502:Food; D011235:Predatory Behavior; D047011:Silk / Q000032:analysis* / Q000378:metabolism; D013112:Spiders / Q000378:metabolism / Q000502:physiology*
chemical_list: D000596:Amino Acids; D047011:Silk