Meeting Abstract
Whip spiders are a fascinating group of nocturnal predators that navigate back to a refuge after a night of activity in their tropical and subtropical habitat. Their navigational abilities are hypothesized to be under integrated, multisensory control. To further examine the navigational behavior of whip spiders, we performed a series of controlled, repeated laboratory-behavioral experiments using the Costa Rican whip spiders Paraphrynus laevifrons and Phrynus pseudoparvulus. Point sources of visual, olfactory and tactile cues were placed in a circular arena with an artificial shelter placed in one of five possible locations (one location per subject). After an initial pre-training to establish shelter fidelity, subjects were tested in a series of pre-dawn displacement manipulations and their movements were video tracked. Of particular interest were displacements that occurred when the shelter was removed from the arena, enabling us to examine whether the whip spiders were able to relocate the position of the shelter in the absence of any cues originating from it. Analysis of the subjects’ tracks following displacement revealed that they spent more time near the conditioned location of the shelter while it was not present, compared to the other sampled shelter locations in the arena. This supports the hypothesis that whip spiders are able to form a distal-allocentric, spatial representation of a shelter’s location reliant on stimuli external to a shelter itself. Additionally, the results of other analyses suggest that under the testing conditions of the arena, and expectantly, light cues play a particularly important role in the efficiency of navigational behavior of whip spiders.
