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Publication Details
AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS
SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH
agricultural and biological sciences
Survival benefits select for group living in a social spider despite reproductive costs
Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Volume 20, No. 6, Year 2007
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Description
The evolution of cooperation requires benefits of group living to exceed costs. Hence, some components of fitness are expected to increase with increasing group size, whereas others may decrease because of competition among group members. The social spiders provide an excellent system to investigate the costs and benefits of group living: they occur in groups of various sizes and individuals are relatively short-lived, therefore life history traits and Lifetime Reproductive Success (LRS) can be estimated as a function of group size. Sociality in spiders has originated repeatedly in phylogenetically distant families and appears to be accompanied by a transition to a system of continuous intra-colony mating and extreme inbreeding. The benefits of group living in such systems should therefore be substantial. We investigated the effect of group size on fitness components of reproduction and survival in the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola in two populations in Namibia. In both populations, the major benefit of group living was improved survival of colonies and late-instar juveniles with increasing colony size. By contrast, female fecundity, female body size and early juvenile survival decreased with increasing group size. Mean individual fitness, estimated as LRS and calculated from five components of reproduction and survival, was maximized for intermediate- to large-sized colonies. Group living in these spiders thus entails a net reproductive cost, presumably because of an increase in intra-colony competition with group size. This cost is traded off against survival benefits at the colony level, which appear to be the major factor favouring group living. In the field, many colonies occur at smaller size than expected from the fitness curve, suggesting ecological or life history constraints on colony persistence which results in a transient population of relatively small colonies. © 2007 The Authors.
Authors & Co-Authors
Bilde, Trine
Denmark, Aarhus
Aarhus Universitet
Sweden, Uppsala
Evolutionsbiologiskt Centrum
Coates, K. S.
Denmark, Aarhus
Aarhus Universitet
Birkhofer, Klaus
Germany, Darmstadt
Technische Universität Darmstadt
Bird, Tharina L.
Namibia, Windhoek
National Museum of Namibia
Maklakov, A. A.
Sweden, Uppsala
Evolutionsbiologiskt Centrum
Israel, Beer-sheva
Ben-gurion University of the Negev
Lubin, Yael D.
Israel, Beer-sheva
Ben-gurion University of the Negev
Aviles, Leticia
Canada, Vancouver
The University of British Columbia
Statistics
Citations: 111
Authors: 7
Affiliations: 6
Identifiers
Doi:
10.1111/j.1420-9101.2007.01407.x
ISSN:
1010061X
e-ISSN:
14209101
Research Areas
Sexual And Reproductive Health
Study Design
Cross Sectional Study
Study Locations
Namibia
Participants Gender
Female