Spatiotemporal Variation in House Spider Phenology at a National Scale Using Citizen Science

Abstract

The seasonal appearance of Tegenaria and Eratigena (the best known of the UK genera termed "house spiders") results in considerable public and media interest. Here, we present the largest dataset ever gathered on the occurrence of house spiders anywhere in the world. We collected almost 10,000 records from different locations within the UK (amounting to ca. 250X more locations and 25X more records than any previous study) over a 6-month period. Using this dataset, which contained details of sighting dates, times, location within UK, location within the home, location within rooms and sex, we were able to investigate a number of aspects of house spider ecology. Eighty-two percent of records were males, supporting previous studies that showed house spider surges in autumn are predominantly males seeking mates. Sightings peaked in mid-September with a significant northwest progression 2 across the UK as autumn progressed. Daily activity peaked at 19:35hrs and spiders were seen more-orless uniformly throughout different rooms and we discuss why this is more likely to be because of spider ecology than human behaviour. Within rooms, there was a sex-based difference in ecology with females more common on ceilings and doors/windows and males more common on walls, possibly because of sex-specific differences in mobility.

Testing the potential of Twitter mining methods for data acquisition: Evaluating novel opportunities for ecological research in multiple taxa

“…Hart et al. () found a statistically significant but weak effect of latitude and longitude on spider phenology with sightings moving northwards and westwards through the autumn; a similar effect was found here using Twitter‐derived data (Spearman rank correlation for latitude: r s = 0.067, n = 1,606, p = 0.008; longitude: r s = −0.070, n = 1,606, p = 0.005). The r 2 values estimated from Pearson were 0.004 and 0.002 for latitude and longitude, respectively, versus 0.076 and 0.027 in Hart et al.…”

“…Sightings of house spiders (likely Tegenaria and Eratigena were reported via a citizen science study (Hart et al., ) (top) and derived from mentions within in tweets for the same year (middle) and the previous year (bottom). Week 1 begins on August 1st.…”

“…To find out more about the species involved an additional study in 2013 where the public also submitted samples of the winged ants they recorded ( N = 436). The house spider study (Hart et al., ) ran across autumn and winter 2013/14 from 1st August 2013 (day 1) to 28th January 2014 (day 181). The starling murmuration study (Goodenough et al., ) ran across autumn and winter in 2014/15 and 2015/16 covering the period 1st October (day 1) to 31st March (day 183).…”

“…It included analyses of synchronicity and spatial concurrence of winged ant emergences (“flying ants”) at national and regional scales. The second study assessed geographical patterns, seasonal peaks, daily rhythms and location of spiders (primarily those in the genera Tengenaria and Eratigena ) within houses during the autumn (Hart, Nesbit, & Goodenough, ). The third study examined starling ( Sturnus vulgaris ) murmuration behaviour to assess the effect of predators and temperature (Goodenough et al., ).…”

Mapping species distributions in 2 weeks using citizen science

“…These problems result in data that are patchy (Maldonado et al ., ) and often biased towards charismatic groups attractive to the public, for example the Big Garden Birdwatch (Lewandowski & Specht, ). Despite taxonomic biases, there are examples of citizen science approaches on non‐charismatic taxa such as spiders (Campbell & Engelbrecht, ; Hart et al ., ; Wang et al ., ) and beetles (Zapponi et al ., ), and producing valid ecological insights (Pocock et al ., ; Hart et al ., ). Overall, it is not always straightforward to assess the validity of citizen science data since high‐quality data sets for direct comparison are rarely available (Kamp et al ., ; Dennis et al ., ).…”