Where beauty hides: spiders as models for elegant research and educational inspiration

Tuesday 30 August 14:00 GMT
spiders sexual selection behavioural ecology

During the last decades studies on spider behavior have flourished in Latin America. Spiders give us the possibility of intertwining elegant experiments in the laboratory with studies in the field. This animal group has a diverse array of conspicuous behavioral strategies during courtship, mating and after mating, in which females are decisive in determining the fate of sexual interactions. During the talk and after a brief historical introduction, I will share representative examples of studies performed at the Neotropics aimed to test sexual selection hypotheses in spiders, highlighting challenging areas for future research.