Fireflies use their characteristic flashing signals to find and attract mates. It’s a courtship ritual that can seem magical on a warm summer evening. However, for orb weaver spiders, these displays are more than just a spectacle — the spiders can manipulate the light signals of male fireflies, turning them into unwitting lures to attract more prey to the spiders’ web, new research reveals. Both male and female fireflies of the species Abscondita terminalis emit bioluminescent flashes from their abdomens to attract mates. However, females are typically more sedentary, emitting a single pulse of light from a blade of grass or tree branch. Male fireflies emit two pulses of light as they fly about looking for females. Since males are more active, they are much more likely to be caught in a spider’s web to begin with. But researchers have found that orb weaver spiders (Araneus ventricosus) are not satisfied with the occasional firefly passerby. To increase their food supply, the spiders manipulate the male fireflies to change the light patterns they emit. Instead of two flashes, once ensnared, male fireflies begin to emit a single pulse of light like a female firefly. “The outcome is that the entrapped male fireflies broadcast false signals that lure more male fireflies into the web,” the study authors write. The researchers conducted experiments on 161 orb weaver webs on farmland near Wuhan, China. They created four different treatments: webs with spiders and without spiders, as well as webs with normal fireflies and webs…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Article by:
This story first appeared on Mongabay
South Africa Today – Environment
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
