Meeting Abstract
In order to gain a complete understanding of how organisms behave in nature, their interactions with abiotic factors must be considered. In particular, temperature is critical to the lives of all animals, affecting many aspects of an animal’s metabolism and behavior. Ectothermic animals (those that do not metabolically regulate their own body temperature) are particularly interesting in this context because they do not experience temperature in the same way as endotherms. Since they have no way to generate body heat, ectotherms’ metabolic rates are directly tied to ambient temperature. Thermal physiology studies frequently address maximum and minimum temperatures under which these animals can sustain life or perform certain activities, but how such organisms modify complex behaviors in response to temperature changes within biologically relevant conditions is less well understood. In this study, we sought to understand how ambient temperature affects both male courtship signals and the mate choice patterns of females across natural temperatures. To investigate this, we used the species Habronattus clypeatus, an ectothermic desert-dwelling species of jumping spider to examine (1) how male visual and vibratory signals change with respect to temperature and, (2) how females respond to these changes in male signals. Temperature seems to play a key role in Habronattus mating systems, and has important implications for the study of behavior in ectotherms.
