Meeting Abstract
Temperature is an important factor influencing all aspects of animals’ lives, from physiology to behavior and ecology. One understudied research avenue is understanding how temperature affects sexual behavior. In a previous study, we discovered that desert-dwelling jumping spiders (Habronattus clypeatus) have temperature-dependent multimodal sexual signals. Aspects of male visual and vibratory signals change dramatically with ambient temperature. Females also show different patterns of sexual receptivity at different temperatures. In the present study, we performed mating trials at two different temperatures with H. clypeatus to explore the details of female mate choice. We specifically used a network analytical approach to understand (1) how aspects of sexual displays are correlated with one another and (b) how these networks change with changing temperatures. We performed courtship trials at room temperature (~25 C) and at a temperature shown previously to result in higher mating rates (~50 C). We then measured a number of aspects of male and female sexual behavior, and assessed changes in the correlation network structure of courtship, specifically network modularity and edge density. Network structure is predicted to change if different components of courtship respond differently to changes in temperature, which previous research suggests may be the case. Changes in a courtship display’s correlation network can affect both how selection courtship acts, and the information that the display is able to contain. With these methods, we are able to give a more nuanced view of how multicomponent displays are comprised and change with changing environmental conditions.
