ArticleScientific reports2020
Black widows as plastic wallflowers: female choosiness increases with indicators of high mate availability in a natural population.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- Male Mating Behaviour Is Shaped by Previous Experience of Both Conspecific and Heterospecific Females in the Seed BugEcology and evolution · 2026Article
- Identification and Seasonal Abundance of Web- and Air-Borne Sex Pheromone Components of Western Black Widow Spiders, Latrodectus hesperus.Journal of chemical ecology · 2025Article
- Widow spiders alter web architecture and attractiveness in response to same-sex competition for prey and mates, and predation risk.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Pre-copulatory choices drive post-copulatory decisions: mechanisms of female control shift across different life stages.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- A comprehensive overview of the effects of urbanisation on sexual selection and sexual traits.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Review
- Juvenile Experience with Male Cues Triggers Cryptic Choice Mechanisms in Adult Female Redback Spiders.Insects · 2021Article
- Human-induced pheromone pollution leads to changes in alternative mating tactics of moths.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- Social and physical environment independently affect oviposition decisions inBehavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Female choice is an important driver of sexual selection, but can be costly, particularly when choosy females risk remaining unmated or experience delays to reproduction. Thus, females should reduce choosiness when mate encounter rates are low. We asked whether choosiness is affected by social context, which may provide reliable information about the local availability of mates. This has been demonstrated in the lab, but rarely under natural conditions. We studied western black widow spiders (Latrodectus hesperus) in the field, placing experimental final-instar immature females so they were either 'isolated' or 'clustered' near naturally occurring conspecifics (≥10 m or ≤1 m, respectively, from a microhabitat occupied by at least one other female). Upon maturity, females in both treatments were visited by similar numbers of males, but clustered females were visited by males earlier and in more rapid succession than isolated females, confirming that proximity to conspecifics reduces the risk of remaining unmated. As predicted, isolated females were less choosy in staged mating trials, neither rejecting males nor engaging in pre-copulatory cannibalism, in contrast to clustered females. These results demonstrate that exposure of females to natural variation in demography in the field can alter choosiness of adults. Thus, female behaviour in response to cues of local population density can affect the intensity of sexual selection on males in the wild.
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