ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Male black widows parasitize mate-searching effort of rivals to find females faster.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Identification and Seasonal Abundance of Web- and Air-Borne Sex Pheromone Components of Western Black Widow Spiders, Latrodectus hesperus.Journal of chemical ecology · 2025Article
- Starving infecund widow spiders maintain sexual attractiveness and trade off safety for enhanced prey capture.iScience · 2024Article
- Does female control and male mating system predict courtship investment and mating outcomes? A comparative study in five widow spider species (genus Latrodectus) tested under similar laboratory conditions.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Female mating rates and their fitness consequences in the common house spiderEcology and evolution · 2022Article
- Origin, structure and functional transition of sex pheromone components in a false widow spider.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Males of a sexually cannibalistic spider chemically assess relative female quality.BMC evolutionary biology · 2020Article
- Immature mating as a tactic of polygynous male western widow spiders.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2020Article
- Male black widows parasitize mate-searching effort of rivals to find females faster.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Risky business: males choose more receptive adults over safer subadults in a cannibalistic spider.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mate-searching success is a critical precursor to mating, but there is a dearth of research on traits and tactics that confer a competitive advantage in finding potential mates. Theory and available empirical evidence suggest that males locate mates using mate-attraction signals produced by receptive females (personal information) and avoid inadvertently produced cues from rival males (social information) that indicate a female has probably already mated. Here, we show that western black widow males use both kinds of information to find females efficiently, parasitizing the searching effort of rivals in a way that guarantees competition over mating after reaching a female's web. This tactic may be adaptive because female receptivity is transient, and we show that (i) mate searching is risky (88% mortality) and (ii) a strongly male-biased operational sex ratio (from 1.2 : 1 to more than 10 : 1) makes competition inevitable. Males with access to rivals' silk trails moved at higher speeds than those with only personal information, and located females even when personal information was unreliable or absent. We show that following rivals can increase the potential for sexual selection on females as well as males and argue it may be more widespread in nature than is currently realized.
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