20th International Congress of Arachnology

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In the prolonged subsocial spider, Delena cancerides,
juveniles remain with their mother under a piece of
bark until they reach maturity. Unlike most other
group-living spiders, D. cancerides is a central place
forager: individuals leave the bark retreat at dusk
to feed and return at dawn. Spiders can travel many
meters in a single night and may encounter foreign
colonies. Molecular data show that some individu-
als in a colony are immigrants unrelated to the adult
female and her offspring, and behavioral assays show
that spiders differentiate kin from nonkin by preferen-
tially cannibalizing nonkin and spending more time
investigating unfamiliar conspecifics. To understand
the mechanism behind this recognition, I extracted the
cuticular molecules of male and female spiders and
the juveniles of two families. I present the preliminary
analysis of the compound blend and their differences
among individuals.
Keywords: chemical communication, hydrocarbon, kin
recognition, subsocial
Oral presentation
Salticidae (Arachnida: Araneae) of islands
off Australia revisited
Marek Żabka, Łukasz Tr ębicki, Barbara Patoleta
Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities,
Zooogy Department, Prusa 12, 08-110 Siedlce, Poland
Island salticids have been studied on several occasions,
including our first approach made in 1999. The current
project included 64 islands, most of them in tropi-
cal part of Queensland. The islands have been divided
according to their climate (tropical, temperate), origin
(coral, volcanic), distance from the continent (within
or outside the continental shelf), size, topography,
biotic diversity and intensity of human penetration. Due
to the fact that some islands were connected with the
continent during Pleistocene ice age and others had no
such connections, we expected their faunas to be more
balanced (continental) or disharmonic, respectively.
The material included about 700 field records and
has been analyzed in terms of genus/species diversity,
endemism, biotic preferences and dispersal. At least 41
genera have been identified and the number of species
appeared several times higher. In comparison to over
70 genera and 400 species known from the whole
Australia, the numbers seem quite substantial. Several
genera predominated the data: Lycidas/Jotus (101
records), Cosmophasis (37), Holoplatys/Ocrisiona (29),
Simaetha (22), Clynotis (19), Neon (19). The majority
of records came from different types of forests and the
list of microhabitats included leaf litter, tree trunks/
bark, and vegetation of different strata, each known to
require unique living strategies and to offer different
dispersal potential. Not surprisingly, the Lord Howe
Island has proved to possess highly endemic fauna,
but also other islands, such as Barrow Island (close to
Western Australian coast) appeared an important biodi-
versity centre (genus Cytaea). Our research confirmed
the islands to be an important model for the research
of salticid dispersal and colonization, but for the results
to be fully comprehensive the sampling methods should
be unified and the investigated biota and microhabitats
should be more representative.
Keywords: Salticidae, taxonomy, islands, biogeography
Student - oral presentation
Ornamental coloration associated assess-
ment strategy in male-male contests of
Siler semiglaucus jumping spiders
*Hua Zeng1 , Xiaodong Yang2, Daiqin Li1
1Department of Biological Sciences, National Uni-
versity of Singapore, 14 Science Drive 4, Singapore;
2Xishuangbannan Tropical Botany Garden, Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Menglun, Yunnan, China
Animals engaging in potential time and energy cost
contests are expected to estimate either the resource-
holding potential (RHP) of their own (‘self-assessment
strategy’), or difference between their rivals and their
own (‘mutual assessment strategy’). Body size is com-
monly used as a proxy for RHP in animal contests. Male
ornamental coloration exhibits on the body of male
206 DENVER MUSEUM OF NATURE & SCIENCE REPORTS | No. 3, July 2, 2016
Cushing