We are increasingly aware of individual differences in behaviour aka personalities across animal taxa. However, how various behavioural types are maintained, have been rarely tested experimentally. We investigated whether the aggressiveness type in spider Larinioides sclopetarious influences the probability of mating and whether the mating pattern could be important for maintaining the variation. We found that aggressive males tended to mate with aggressive females while less aggressive males were more likely to copulate with less aggressive females. We concluded that assortative mating by behavioural type is a potential mechanism that together with frequency dependent selection maintains the existence of consistent behavioural types.
COBISS.SI-ID: 35503661
Sexual cannibalism is a rare phenomenon in animal world, but common in several spider species. It has been explained by many hypotheses, e.g. female hunger and mate choice. Pre-copulatory cannibalism, where virgin females devour males before mating, is more puzzling to explain, because it may bring no benefit to either sex. In his seminal paper, Goran Arnqvist (1997) proposed that pre-copulatory cannibalism represents a spillover of female aggressiveness from the juvenile foraging context, when aggressiveness is advantageous, to the adult mating context, when aggressiveness may be non-adaptive or mal-adaptive; this is so-called “aggressive-spillover hypothesis=ASH”. In other words, individuals exhibit limited plasticity in aggressive behaviours because they are genetically canalized for indiscriminate aggressiveness towards prey and conspecifics, including males. Hence, a tendency to employ pre-copulatory cannibalism is supposed to be a part of the female aggression syndrome, an assertion generally accepted in the personality field. We found serious caveats in ASH and therefore re-evaluated findings reporting support for ASH. While the ASH explains pre-copulatory cannibalism solely based on female aggressiveness, we conclude that other factors may work in concert with personality, such as female hunger level, mate size dimorphism, mate behaviour and quality. Cannibalistic females have never been found to experience curtailed fitness as predicted by ASH. We warned to consider ASH more critically and propose further directions. The review was published in Ethology and already received two answers both agreeing and explaining their view where differ.
COBISS.SI-ID: 35783213
Relationships between environmental factors (soil, topographic, climatic and management) and plant species-richness, as well as the composition of plant species in wet grasslands, were studied with a view to quantifying the relative contribution of different abiotic factors, such as soil chemical parameters, topology, climatic conditions and human impact, to diversity of vascular plants and floristic composition. The study contributes to understanding the vegetation-environment relation.
COBISS.SI-ID: 2734415
The study compares the impact of macro-ecological (climatic) and local ecological (reflected through altitude, inclination etc.) factors on the floristics, structure, ecology and origin of beech forests. Structure is evaluated by plant functional traits, ecology by indicator values and origin by the geoelemental spectrum. It was revealed that the macro-ecological factor is more important than local ecological factors. The study found that beech forests, although they are all dominated by beech, are floristically, structurally, ecologically and by origin different in different macro-ecological regions.
COBISS.SI-ID: 34167085
We published a new molecular phylogeny of a model spider group, the family Nephilidae. These spiders are known for female and web gigantism and for extreme sexual size dimorphism with males over 100 times lighter than the females. These spiders are therefore model organisms for many biological studies, but the only available phylogenetic hypothesis so far has been a morphological one from 2008. Our paper adds a new phylogeny, based on massive original molecular data and modern phylogenetic analyses, and this phylogeny sheds a completely new light upon the nephilid evolution.
COBISS.SI-ID: 36058925