Brilliant 10: Jonathan Pruitt Studies How (Spider) Societies Function

Tuesday, September 22, 2015 - 05:30 in Biology & Nature

Jonathan Pruitt Alexander Wells Jonathan Pruitt’s typical workday involves hours spent crouched in deserts and forests, observing the social lives of colony-building spiders. Like people, certain arachnids have different personalities—some are docile, some are aggressive—and Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Pittsburgh, studies how these social traits affect survival. His findings provide the first evidence that individuals in the wild sometimes sacrifice their own genetic survival for the sake of the group—a topic of hot contention among biologists for 40 years. Though evolutionary models suggested that such group selection must be occurring, no one had found solid proof. Life as a spider is risky. Each year 60 to 90 percent of colonies collapse. “It’s death, death, death—little carcasses blowing in the wind,” Pruitt says. But he found that a colony’s survival isn’t...

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