From so simple a beginning

Evolution and Biodiversity

Month: June 2017

Glue-coated silk

30 June 2017 /

Ground spider immobilises prey with sticky threads

Ground spider captures prey with sticky threads

Many ground spiders can handle large or dangerous prey. They swathe their victims’ legs with threads that are coated with a tough glue, as Jonas Wolff and colleagues show.

Sticky threads

Ground spiders (Gnaphosidae) do not capture their prey by building a web, but hunt for them on the ground. For some of them, this is a risky venture because they aim for large or dangerous prey, such as ants and other spiders. Jonas Wolff and colleagues found out how they managed to capture these prey.

The researchers recorded the behaviour of a number of ground spiders during an attack with a high speed camera and analyzed the footage. When a ground spider perceives a prey, they observed, it first tries to grab it with its front legs. If it fails because the victim is large or dangerous, it quickly switches to another tactic and applies sticky silk threads to the soil and to the opponent’s legs and mouth parts to immobilise it; sometimes, an entangled prey spider still tries to defend itself by biting – hunting is never without risk.

Other spider species don’t produce such sticky silk threads. Spider silk is made in glands, and comparing the silk glands of ground spiders that swathe the legs of their prey with those of other species, the researchers found clear differences.

Spiders possess different types of silk glands, each of which makes another type of silk. The glands produce a liquid mixture of silk proteins and have a tapering duct ending in a nozzle-like opening (the spigot) on a spinneret; spiders have one to four pairs of spinnerets on their abdomen and make threads by pulling the protein mixture from the spigots.

In most spider species, the largest pair of spinnerets bears the spigot of a single large ampullate gland. This gland produces the strong silk of which draglines are made: the structural threads of webs of web-building species and the drop lines that spiders make when they drop. In addition, there are the spigots of numerous tiny piriform glands; they produce short glue-coated fibres of which spiders spin attachment disks to link the threads of their web at the intersections, or to anchor a dragline to, for instance, a tree.

Modified glands

In ground spiders that use sticky threads to capture their prey, the silk glands are strongly modified. The ampullate glands are relatively small, while the piriform glands are enlarged and have wide spigots. Ground spiders entangle their prey with the silk threads pulled from these enlarged piriform glands. The threads are coated with a layer of ductile, tough glue, perfect for swathing and immobilising struggling prey.

So, ground spiders developed a novel use of piriform silk, and the morphology of the silk glands is adapted to this novel use. The consequence is that they are not able to make functional draglines and fully functional attachment disks. Like many other spider species, they build a silk shelter in which they hide (of yet another type of silk), but they can’t anchor that shelter to the substrate as well as other spider species do. That’s the price they have to pay for their exclusive hunting method.

Willy van Strien

Photo:
Mouse spider Scotophaeus blackwalli. Richard Pigott (via Flickr; Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Source:
Wolff, J.O., M. Řezáč, T. Krejčí & S. Gorb, 2017. Hunting with sticky tape: functional shift in silk glands of araneophagous ground spiders (Gnaphosidae). Journal of Experimental Biology 220: 2250-2259. Doi: 10.1242/jeb.154682

Slimy lips

21 June 2017 /

Southern tubelip feeds on corals by kissing

Labropsis autralis feeding on corals

As one of only a few fish species, the tubelip wrasse Labropsis australis is able to feed on corals. Specialised lips protect the fish from being hurt, as Victor Huertas and David Bellwood show.

Lips of Labropsis australis bear lamellaeThe tubelip wrasse Labropsis australis, or Southern tubelip, looks like a normal fish. But it appears to have highly modified lips, as Victor Huertas and David Bellwood reveal after making a high-resolution image of the fish’s mouth. The lips form a protruding tube when the mouth is closed; they are thick and fleshy, bear lamellae much like a mushroom, and are covered with a thick layer of mucus, secreted by mucous glands.

Just like kissing

That’s noteworthy, as most wrasses, the group of fish species to which Labropsis australis belongs, have thin, smooth lips that are neither slimy nor protruding.

The remarkable lips facilitate un unusual diet, the researchers found out. Living on the Great Barrier Reef off the north coast of Australia, Labropsis australis feeds on hard corals – and that’s not easy, because the corals have a sharp skeleton covered by a layer of tissue with venomous stinging nematocysts, like jellyfish have. No wonder that most fishes don’t touch them. But Labropsis australis seems not to care.

The biologists recorded the fish’s behaviour with a high-speed camera to see how it managed to feed on corals. Analyzing the footage, they saw how the fish approaches its meal, closes its mouth, pushes its fleshy lips against the coral, sealing them over a small area, and rapidly sucks off some of the coral’s mucus and flesh. This sucking is accompanied by an audible ‘tuk’; it’s just like kissing.

Mucus is the key factor that enables these fish to feed on corals, the authors suppose. The thick mucus layer prevents the sharp edges and nematocysts of the coral from damaging the fish.

Willy van Strien

Photos: © Victor Huertas and David Bellwood
Large: Southern tubelip Labropsis australis
Small: Image of the lips of Labropsis australis

The kissing tubelip wrasse on a video made by Victor Huertas and David Bellwoo

Source:
Huertas, V. & D.R. Bellwood, 2017. Mucus-secreting lips offer protection to suction-feeding corallivorous fishes. Current Biology 27: R399–R407. Doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.04.056

Sweet snack

15 June 2017 /

Wild bees can do without flowers – for a while

Andrena-bee visiting a flowerless shrub

When spring arrives in California, wild bees emerge before flowers appear that offer nectar, providing the animals with energy. To survive, they temporarily use sugary honeydew, as Joan Meiners and colleagues discovered.

It seems weird for bees to visit non-flowering shrubs, because they need flowers to find nectar, which contains sugars, and pollen, which contains protein; these nutrients are necessary for themselves and their larvae. Yet, in the Pinnacles National Park in California, Joan Meiners observed many wild bees of different species visiting shrubs on which no flower was to be found.

Honeydew

With a series of experiments, she and her colleagues found out what the bees were looking for at the non-flowering shrubs: the animals were accessing sugary honeydew, the sweet secretions of sap-feeding scale insects. It appeared that bees visit flowerless shrubs only early in the springtime, when they emerge while there are hardly any flowers blooming, and that all these bees belong to solitary species, not living in colonies where a stockpile of nectar is available. Apparently, in early spring honeydew is an alternative source of energy for these bees, a new discovery.

Now, the question is how the bees are able to find this alternative food source. They are specialists in detecting and distinguishing colours and scents. Flowers depend on bees for pollination, because as bees visit multiple flowers in succession, they transfer pollen from the stamens of one flower to the pistil of the next one, so that this second flower can grow seeds after fertilization. Because bees are indispensable, flowers attract them with showy scents, colours and shapes.

Still, bees manage to find the colourless, odourless honeydew as well.

Looking for food

Are they attracted by the black mold fungus that covers the honeydew? The researchers ruled out this possibility by painting a number of branches black: these branches were not visited by the bees. Do the scale insects form a clue to the honeydew? No, because if the sap-sucking insects were temporarily inactivated with a mild anti-insecticide, no bees were seen nearby; they only came when the scale insects were producing honeydew. But on the other hand, they did detect sticks on which the researchers had sprayed a sugar solution, and they did already within an hour.

The biologists propose that the bees are continuously looking for food, and if one bee locates some honeydew, other bees will notice and visit the food source as well.

Using honeydew as an extra source of energy, the bees can survive a period without nectar. But in the end they do need flowers, because the larvae cannot develop on a diet of sugars alone, but have to ingest a high amount of proteins, and therefore they need pollen. So, every female has to gather pollen for her offspring.

Once plants start flowering, bees lose their interest in honeydew-bearing shrubs and visit flowers instead. The mutual relationship between bees and flowers – where pollination is exchanged for food – is not jeopardized.

Willy van Strien

Photo: ©Paul G. Johnson

Source:
Meiners, J.M, T.L. Griswold, D.J. Harris & S.K.M. Ernest, 2017. Bees without flowers: before peak bloom, diverse native bees find insect-produced honeydew sugars. The American Naturalist, online May 30. Doi: 10.1086/692437

Fast trapping device

2 June 2017 /

Water flea has no chance against bladderwort bladders

Southern bladderwort possesses fast trapping device

There is no escape for a water flea that hits one of the submerged suction traps of bladderwort. Within a split second, the trapdoor opens and closes and the water flea has disappeared, as Simon Poppinga and colleagues show.

Some carnivorous plants, which feed on small animals, possess motile traps to capture insects or other prey. The fasted motile trapping device belongs to aquatic bladderwort species, according to Simon Poppinga and colleagues.

greater bladderwort, leaves with trapsThe stems with yellow flowers of these floating water plants are visible above water level, while the leaves, bearing bladder-like suction traps, are below surface. Using a high-speed camera, the researchers recorded the action of the suction process in Southern bladderwort bladders when trapping a water flea.

Each trap is filled with water, sometimes also with some air, and because water is continuously pumped out, there is a negative pressure within. The bladder entrance is closed with a flexible door which is fixed along the upper part, resting on a threshold and bulging outwards; it bears trigger hairs that are sensitive to touch.

Immobilized

As soon as a water flea touches a trigger hair, the door will invert its curvature, bulging inwards. In that position it can’t resist the water pressure and swings open. The water flea is sucked into the bladder with a velocity that increases to 4 meters per second. It is unable to interfere with the process in any way. As soon as it is in, the water flow decelerates. The strong acceleration and deceleration immobilize the animal and maybe even kill it. And if still alive, the water flea will die soon due to anoxia.

The door recloses and regains the convex curvature. The whole process took only 0.01 second, and within a couple of hours, the prey will be digested.

Willy van Strien

Photos:
Large: Southern bladderwort. Abalg (via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons CC BY 3.0)
Small: leaves with suction traps of greater bladderwort. H. Zell (via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

Source:
Poppinga, S., L.E. Daber, A.S. Westermeier, S. Kruppert, M. Horstmann, R. Tollrian & T. Speck, 2017. Biomechanical analysis of prey capture in the carnivorous Southern bladderwort (Utricularia australis). Scientific Reports 7: 1776. Doi:10.1038/s41598-017-01954-3

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