Meeting Abstract
Many organisms benefit from innate anti-predator responses. Innate response behaviors can save precious processing time that may mean the difference between capture and escape. Such behaviors are often under strong natural selection to be retained. However, this creates an opportunity for others to exploit such responses. Male courtship displays in jumping spiders provide an exciting opportunity for studying how predator-mimicking traits might induce anti-predatory responses in female receivers. Inducing female anti-predator responses might advantage males through reduced female pre-copulatory sexual cannibalism and/or via reductions in female movement, a typical anti-predatory response. Here, we investigate whether the abdominal fan displays of Australian peacock spiders (genus Maratus) mimic the faces of local invertebrate predators. To investigate this, we digitally characterized the abdominal patterns males use in courtship. We then compared these patterns to the facial patterning of co-occurring predators using principal component and machine learning analyses. We find broad overlap in the principal components of Maratus fans, mantid faces and wasp faces, as compared to various controls, such as foliage, background substrates, and other insects. Machine learning classification (MLC) results in higher false discovery rates for Maratus than any other group. MLC also struggled to parse Maratus fans from native wasp faces. However, MLC readily discriminated between Maratus fans and invasive wasp species, suggesting that the Maratus fan features responsible for predator resemblance are the result of shared evolutionary history within their native communities, rather than generic predator-like facial features. We discuss how the �ecology of fear� may play a role in the evolution of courtship.
