Tropical storms are making these spiders more aggressive.

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Aggressive comb-footed spiders are better storm survivors, according to a new study.Judy Gallagher/Wikimedia
▼ After Tropical Storm Florence inundated North and South Carolina in September 2018, Jonathan Pruitt drove up and down the East Coast of the United States, scouring for telltale signs of damage. But he wasn’t looking for destroyed homes; he was looking for spider nests—and the spiders that had survived the storm. What the behavioral ecologist and his colleagues at the University of California (UC), Santa Barbara, found was provocative: Aggressive spiders survived the storm—and others like it—better than their docile counterparts, leading to bolder future colonies.
“This [study] is, of course, fantastic because it’s actually very tricky and risky,” says Eric Ameca, a conservation biologist at the University of Veracruz in Xalapa, Mexico, who was not involved in the work. Studies on the ecological effects of tropical cyclones are rare, he says, because of the dangers of storm debris, and because predicting landfall for such storms is a tricky, but necessary, part of gathering baseline data. Plus, most storm-related studies only focus on human survivors. But, Ameca says, “We don’t really know the consequences for wildlife.”
To find out how tropical storms affect biodiversity, Alexander Little, a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara, spent a summer tracking the survival rates of aggressive and docile colonies of comb-footed spiders along the U.S. East Coast. When unexpected circumstances meant he couldn’t make it into the field, Pruitt, his adviser, took over. Riding in his pickup truck and listening to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time fantasy novels, Pruitt drove hundreds of kilometers to track incoming storms and collect data.
The spiders in the study,Anelosimus studiosus, are a type of comb-footed spider well known for exhibiting one of two wildly different behaviors: aggressive and docile. Aggressive spiders attack prey immediately and (▪ ▪ ▪)

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