Untangling the social lives of spiders

The idea of a complex spider society—in which thousands of spiders live, hunt, and raise their young together in a single colony—is unsettling to many of us. We are perhaps lucky then that this scene is relatively rare among arachnids. Among the 40,000 known species of spiders, the vast majority live solitary lives and will often show aggression toward other spiders they encounter, even within their own species. There are fewer than 25 known species of social spiders, distributed broadly across 6 different families and 9 different genera. Not only do these spiders live in social groups, but they produce populations that grow over time as new offspring are added to the nest, enabling the capture of increasingly large prey as the colony expands, and even give rise to new daughter colonies. As social creatures ourselves, humans have long been interested in the evolutionary innovations that enable social cooperation. In a new article in Genome Biology and Evolution titled "Comparative genomics identifies putative signatures of sociality in spiders", researchers provide one of the first glimpses into the genetic underpinnings for how a solitary spider evolves into a social one.

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