Some species have an incredible talent for manipulating others to get what they want. Scientists have now discovered a fascinating new example – some spiders have been observed manipulating the light of fireflies to more Errors in their networks.
There’s nothing quite like the glorious glow of fireflies lighting up the balmy twilight of late summer. Don’t tell the kids, but these insects are actually looking to get lucky. The males fly around flashing their two lanterns in multiple-pulse patterns to attract the attention of the females, who usually stay in one spot and flash their one lantern in single-pulse patterns. When the ladies signal their interest, the males pounce on them.
Interestingly, certain spiders seem to have figured out how to take advantage of this. Male fireflies caught in the webs of orb-weaver spiders changed their flashing pattern to resemble that of the females, thus attracting all the male fireflies to the garden.
The study was prompted when lead author Xinhua Fu noticed that fireflies trapped in spider webs seemed to be almost exclusively male. Curious about the cause, the researchers examined 161 webs and compared the blinking patterns of free male and female fireflies, as well as those in webs and whether or not a spider was present.
Xinhua News
As it turns out, it wasn’t just the fireflies that were going crazy and sending out a distress signal or something. The researchers found that when the spider wasn’t home, captured fireflies didn’t seem to attract more males. The spider seemed to actively control the signals – they could be seen performing a special cycle of wrapping around and biting the fireflies that they didn’t do with other insects, or with fireflies whose lanterns had been dimmed by the researchers.
“When the spider detects the bioluminescent signals of the captured male fireflies, it adopts a special prey handling procedure that involves repeated wrap-bite attacks,” said Daiqin Li, co-author of the study.
Whether it’s something in the spider’s venom or simply the act of biting itself that triggers the change in firefly signaling remains to be seen, the team says. Further research could help answer that question, and also potentially find other examples of animals cleverly “hacking” their prey to catch more or improve their own life cycle.
The most well-known story is probably that of the “zombie ant fungus,” which forces its infected prey against its will into a nice, high position so that the fungus can grow and release spores that infect more ants. You may even have a similar parasite yourself – Toxoplasma gondiiis found in soil and cat feces. But don’t worry, it’s just trying to get back to its preferred home in the cat’s intestines, and achieving that goal could make you more attractive and entrepreneurial.
The new research was published in the journal Current Biology.
Source: Cell Press via Scimex
