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Hurricanes are causing spiders to be more aggressive, study finds

Areas like Florida are likely to find spiders that are more equipped to survive after a storm.
Credit: Judy Gallagher / Flickr / Creative Commons
This file photo is courtesy of Judy Gallagher and is being used under an Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC By 2.0) creative commons license, which can be found here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

In Hurricane-prone areas, spiders are evolving to be more aggressive and better able to ride out storms, according to a new report.

A study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, says aggressive colonies are better at finding scarce resources, but they're also more likely to fight each other when deprived of food for extended periods of time.

The researchers say aggressiveness can be passed down from parents to children and affects spiders' survival abilities. Based on their findings, they say areas that experience tropical cyclones are more likely to have more aggressive colonies.

"This trend is consistent across multiple storms that varied in both size, duration and intensity. This shows that these effects are not idiosyncratic but are robust evolutionary responses...," the researchers wrote.

The researchers monitored Subtropical Storm Alberto, Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Michael during the 2018 hurricane season. They studied 240 female spider colonies along the Gulf of Mexico.

The study found colonies that more aggressively sought out food produced more egg casings and were more likely to have spiderlings survive into early winter.

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