It is a matter of taste: chemical signals mediate nuptial gift acceptance in a neotropical spider

Cryptic Female Choice and Nuptial Prey Gifts in a Spider Model

“…Spiders are known as being voracious predators, and the available evidence supports the hypothesis that oral gifts have emerged from males' ability to exploit the foraging motivation of females (prey gifts: Bilde et al 2007;Brum et al 2012;body gifts: Andrade 1996;Miller 2007;Wilder et al 2009;glandular gifts: Michalik and Uhl 2011;Kunz et al 2013). Such exploitation allows males to not only securely approach an adult female (Schneider and Andrade 2011, p. 216), but also to induce her to assume an adequate copulation posture, which may have substantial influence over CFC.…”

“…For example, that "males manipulate female position while copulating" may be a consequence of females' help once stimulated to assume such position; that "males have their overall fitness increased by offering a nuptial gift" may be a consequence of females' CFC mechanisms by biasing the fertilization of her eggs favoring an specific male; and so on. I am not diminishing here the importance of the males' perspective to understand a representative fraction of the life history of a species, such as the way that nuptial gifts are shaped in order to better explore females' sensory system, for example (Warwick et al 2009;Brum et al 2012). The point is that much emphasis has been applied only toward the male's perspective, viewing the females as just passive players in this complex and amazing interaction, a criticism raised by Eberhard (1996) and several others.…”

“…Moreover, it is also expected that from time to time there is an inversion in the control of the process between males and females, or even depending on the level of analysis (Eberhard 1996(Eberhard , 2000. In most cases, nuptial gifts represent a variable investment from males with a potential manipulative behavior (Warwick et al 2009;Brum et al 2012). This hypothesis of manipulation considers that nuptial gifts constitute a male sexual strategy that exploits how females perform their choice, which may lead the females to a sub-optimal fitness condition.…”

“…We can take the premise that the more modified or complex the nuptial gift, the more information it contains. Let us take as an example a special class of nuptial gifts within spiders, the prey gifts (see Prey gifts section for a definition): It may consist of nothing but the prey, or may be also covered by a layer of silk that may be used as a source of information between males and females, or at least as a substrate for information exchange (Costa-Schmidt et al 2008;Bilde et al 2007;Brum et al 2012). Certainly, the chance that this character will be used as a source of information for CFC is higher the more complex it is.…”

“…mirabilis: Bilde et al 2007;Prokop and Maxwell 2009;Tuni and Bilde 2010;Albo et al 2011Albo et al , 2014bPa. ornata: Albo and Costa 2010;Brum et al 2012;Trillo et al 2014), a redundant role leading toward a multimodal response of increasing their effects in the same direction (enhancement). However, since the inner content of prey gifts may represent a source of deceptive signal, the information contained within the external silk layer may sometimes overcome the associated information within the inner content (Albo et al 2011), a situation that defines a dominance condition of Table 6.1 Multimodal signal interpretation for prey gifts, following the classification provided in Partan and Marler (1999).…”