Skip to main content
Advertisement

Main menu

  • Home
  • Articles
    • Accepted manuscripts
    • Issue in progress
    • Latest complete issue
    • Issue archive
    • Archive by article type
    • Special issues
    • Subject collections
    • Interviews
    • Sign up for alerts
  • About us
    • About JEB
    • Editors and Board
    • Editor biographies
    • Travelling Fellowships
    • Grants and funding
    • Journal Meetings
    • Workshops
    • The Company of Biologists
    • Journal news
  • For authors
    • Submit a manuscript
    • Aims and scope
    • Presubmission enquiries
    • Article types
    • Manuscript preparation
    • Cover suggestions
    • Editorial process
    • Promoting your paper
    • Open Access
    • Outstanding paper prize
    • Biology Open transfer
  • Journal info
    • Journal policies
    • Rights and permissions
    • Media policies
    • Reviewer guide
    • Sign up for alerts
  • Contacts
    • Contact JEB
    • Subscriptions
    • Advertising
    • Feedback
    • For library administrators
  • COB
    • About The Company of Biologists
    • Development
    • Journal of Cell Science
    • Journal of Experimental Biology
    • Disease Models & Mechanisms
    • Biology Open

User menu

  • Log in

Search

  • Advanced search
Journal of Experimental Biology
  • COB
    • About The Company of Biologists
    • Development
    • Journal of Cell Science
    • Journal of Experimental Biology
    • Disease Models & Mechanisms
    • Biology Open

supporting biologistsinspiring biology

Journal of Experimental Biology

  • Log in
Advanced search

RSS  Twitter  Facebook  YouTube  

  • Home
  • Articles
    • Accepted manuscripts
    • Issue in progress
    • Latest complete issue
    • Issue archive
    • Archive by article type
    • Special issues
    • Subject collections
    • Interviews
    • Sign up for alerts
  • About us
    • About JEB
    • Editors and Board
    • Editor biographies
    • Travelling Fellowships
    • Grants and funding
    • Journal Meetings
    • Workshops
    • The Company of Biologists
    • Journal news
  • For authors
    • Submit a manuscript
    • Aims and scope
    • Presubmission enquiries
    • Article types
    • Manuscript preparation
    • Cover suggestions
    • Editorial process
    • Promoting your paper
    • Open Access
    • Outstanding paper prize
    • Biology Open transfer
  • Journal info
    • Journal policies
    • Rights and permissions
    • Media policies
    • Reviewer guide
    • Sign up for alerts
  • Contacts
    • Contact JEB
    • Subscriptions
    • Advertising
    • Feedback
    • For library administrators
Inside JEB
CRAB SPIDERS' TRICKS FOR YELLOW CAMOUFLAGE
Nicola Stead
Journal of Experimental Biology 2013 216: i-ii; doi: 10.1242/jeb.095422
Nicola Stead
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • Article
  • Info & metrics
  • PDF
Loading

Chameleons and octopuses may be famed for their extraordinary camouflage skills, but this ability is not unique and many animals, big and small, can match their surroundings. Perhaps one of the smallest is the tiny crab spider, Thomisus onustus, which measure between 1 and 10 mm. These tiny arachnids match the vibrant yellows, pinks and whites of their flowery hosts, where they lie in wait for their pollinator prey. Little is known about the reason behind the crab spiders' camouflage (pollinators visit flowers regardless of a spider's colour and these spiders have few predators themselves) or even what controls the reversible colour changes. During her PhD, Ana L. Llandres studied the benefits of camouflage; however, when it came to her post-doc at the IRIB, France, she wanted to turn her attention to the regulation of camouflage: ‘What are the factors that makes spiders change colour?’ With the help of her post-doctoral advisor,


Embedded Image

Jérôme Casas, and lab members Florent Figon, Jean-Philippe Christides and Nicole Mandon, she set out to investigate (p. 3886).

In early April 2012, Llandres travelled to the Extremadura region of Spain, and over the course of 4 days captured 160 female spiders hiding out in bright yellow corn marigolds. Llandres then allowed her spiders to adapt to their new white holding tanks over the course of 23 days, watching them gradually turn a whitish shade. She then wanted to find out whether simply changing the background colour was enough to get the spiders to change colour. So she placed 32 spiders in yellow containers and 18 remained in white containers in a sunny outdoor garden. Measuring light reflectance to precisely distinguish the spiders' colour, she found that, after 15 days, the initially whitish spiders matched their coloured abodes, becoming even whiter in the white containers and yellow in the yellow containers.

But what was controlling this colour change? During the spiders' first 23 days in the lab, Llandres recalls: ‘I saw that spiders that moulted tended to change to a white colour at a slower speed compared to spiders that did not moult. We know from previous studies that when spiders moult they show a peak of ecdysone [hormone] just prior to the moulting event, which made us think that ecdysone hormone could also be linked to the process of yellowing in this species’. To test this, the team decided to inject the spiders with the synthetic version of the hormone, hydroxyecdysone, and keep them in a yellow container in the lab. Sure enough, in the 3 days following the injection the spiders had adopted a yellower colour. However, by day 6, they had reverted to their white colour again. Llandres explains that when hormones are injected, spiders quickly break them down. Without the hormone, and in spite of the yellow backdrop, these spiders just couldn't maintain their yellow colour. In contrast to the earlier experiment, Llandres points out: ‘Natural illumination is much stronger than the illumination present in the laboratory and this may be an important factor that may affect a spider's colour change.’

In conclusion, the study has highlighted that both environmental and hormonal factors control the colour switching. What's more, the results suggest that spiders can actively choose to camouflage themselves based on their background, and won't always just choose a flower that matches their colour. However, the question still remains why are they camouflaging themselves in the first place? By eventually developing a way to actively manipulate the direction of colour change, the group hope they will be in a unique position to answer this century-old question.

  • © 2013. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd

References

    1. Llandres, A. L.,
    2. Figon, F.,
    3. Christides, J.-P.,
    4. Mandon, N. and
    5. Casas, J.
    (2013). Environmental and hormonal factors controlling reversible colour change in crab spiders. J. Exp. Biol. 216, 3886-3895.
    OpenUrlAbstract/FREE Full Text
Previous ArticleNext Article
Back to top
Previous ArticleNext Article

This Issue

 Download PDF

Email

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word on Journal of Experimental Biology.

NOTE: We only request your email address so that the person you are recommending the page to knows that you wanted them to see it, and that it is not junk mail. We do not capture any email address.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
CRAB SPIDERS' TRICKS FOR YELLOW CAMOUFLAGE
(Your Name) has sent you a message from Journal of Experimental Biology
(Your Name) thought you would like to see the Journal of Experimental Biology web site.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Share
Inside JEB
CRAB SPIDERS' TRICKS FOR YELLOW CAMOUFLAGE
Nicola Stead
Journal of Experimental Biology 2013 216: i-ii; doi: 10.1242/jeb.095422
del.icio.us logo Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo CiteULike logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
Citation Tools
Inside JEB
CRAB SPIDERS' TRICKS FOR YELLOW CAMOUFLAGE
Nicola Stead
Journal of Experimental Biology 2013 216: i-ii; doi: 10.1242/jeb.095422

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
Alerts

Please log in to add an alert for this article.

Sign in to email alerts with your email address

Article navigation

  • Top
  • Article
    • References
  • Info & metrics
  • PDF

Related articles

Cited by...

More in this TOC section

  • Hiking trails ideal for sauntering grizzlies
  • Versatile gene expression helps trail-blazing house sparrows adapt
  • Dwarf sperm whales click like shallow dwellers despite open ocean lifestyle
Show more INSIDE JEB

Similar articles

Other journals from The Company of Biologists

Development

Journal of Cell Science

Disease Models & Mechanisms

Biology Open

Advertisement

Predicting the Future: Species Survival in a Changing World

Read our new special issue exploring the significant role of experimental biology in assessing and predicting the susceptibility or resilience of species to future, human-induced environmental change.


Big Biology Podcast - Hollie Putnam and coral bleaching

Catch the next JEB-sponsored episode of the Big Biology Podcast where Art and Marty talk to Hollie Putnam about the causes of coral bleaching and the basic biology of corals in the hope of selectively breeding corals that can better tolerate future ocean conditions.

Read Hollie's Review on the subject, which is featured in our current special issue. 


Stark trade-offs and elegant solutions in arthropod visual systems

Many elegant eye specializations that evolved in response to visual challenges continue to be discovered. A new Review by Meece et al. summarises exciting solutions evolved by insects and other arthropods in response to specific visual challenges.


Head bobbing gives pigeons a sense of perspective

Pigeons might look goofy with their head-bobbing walk, but it turns out that the ungainly head manoeuvre allows the birds to judge distance.

Articles

  • Accepted manuscripts
  • Issue in progress
  • Latest complete issue
  • Issue archive
  • Archive by article type
  • Special issues
  • Subject collections
  • Interviews
  • Sign up for alerts

About us

  • About JEB
  • Editors and Board
  • Editor biographies
  • Travelling Fellowships
  • Grants and funding
  • Journal Meetings
  • Workshops
  • The Company of Biologists
  • Journal news

For Authors

  • Submit a manuscript
  • Aims and scope
  • Presubmission enquiries
  • Article types
  • Manuscript preparation
  • Cover suggestions
  • Editorial process
  • Promoting your paper
  • Open Access
  • Outstanding paper prize
  • Biology Open transfer

Journal Info

  • Journal policies
  • Rights and permissions
  • Media policies
  • Reviewer guide
  • Sign up for alerts

Contact

  • Contact JEB
  • Subscriptions
  • Advertising
  • Feedback

 Twitter   YouTube   LinkedIn

© 2021   The Company of Biologists Ltd   Registered Charity 277992