A MOTHER鈥橲 care sometimes knows no bounds. It turns out that crickets manage to forewarn their offspring of lurking spiders, despite the small matter of never actually meeting them.
, a behavioural ecologist now at the University of South Carolina Upstate, in Spartanburg, briefly exposed lab-grown female crickets to wolf spiders whose fangs had been immobilised with wax, then studied the behaviour of their subsequent offspring.
He found that their offspring remained motionless for longer in the presence of spider silk or droppings than the offspring of mothers that had not been exposed to spiders. Staying still is one of the ways that crickets avoid becoming spider food. Exposing the eggs or juvenile crickets themselves to spider cues did not alter their behaviour, suggesting the mothers had influenced this aspect of their young鈥檚 behaviour during the egg鈥檚 production.
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The maternal heads-up was effective: 鈥渇orewarned鈥� crickets also knew to make use of a crack in their cage to hide from spiders. They survived three times longer in the presence of spiders than the offspring of naive mothers, on average (American Naturalist, ).
Wild-caught crickets from spider-rich habitats also produce more cautious offspring than mothers from spider-poor habitats, Storm found.
He does not know whether the mother鈥檚 warning is transmitted to the egg via maternal hormones or some other mechanism.
