Alternative predatory tactics of an araneophagic a

Authors: Anne E Wignall Phillip W Taylor

Publish Date: 2008/10/25

Volume: 12, Issue: 1, Pages: 23-

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Abstract

Predators of dangerous prey risk being injured or killed in counterattacks and hence may use riskreducing predatory tactics Spiders are often dangerous predators to insects but for a few including Stenolemus bituberus assassin bugs webbuilding spiders are prey Despite the dangers of counterattack when hunting spiders there has been surprisingly little investigation of the predatory tactics used by araneophagic spidereating insects Here we compare the pursuit tendency outcome and predatory tactics of S bituberus against five species of webbuilding spider We found that S bituberus were most likely to hunt and capture spiders from the genus Achaearanea a particularly common prey in nature Capture of Achaearanea sp was more likely if the prey spider was relatively small or if S bituberus was in poor condition S bituberus used two distinct predatory tactics ‘stalking’ in which they slowly approached the prey and ‘luring’ in which they attracted spiders by manipulating the web to generate vibrations Tactics were tailored to the prey species with luring used more often against spiders from the genus Achaearanea and stalking used more often against Pholcus phalangioides The choice of hunting tactic used by S bituberus may reduce the risk posed by the prey spiderWe thank Chris Evans and Robert Jackson for helpful comments throughout the experiments Marie Herberstein and Aaron Harmer and two anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments on the manuscript This study was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council AEW was supported with a RAACE scholarship from Macquarie University

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