The European Conference on Behavioural Biology (ECBB) 2024 was held at the Irchel Campus of the University of Zurich, Switzerland on September 16-19, 2024. It was a joint conference with the Summer Meeting of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB). The theme of this year’s conference was ‘long-term studies in animal behaviour’, but any topic in behavioural biology was welcome.
ECBB 2024 was attended by over 300 people representing 33 different countries. The conference program included 168 talks and 86 posters, as well as 4 plenary speakers (Barbara König, Tim Clutton-Brock, Christina Riehl, and Zegni Triki) over three exciting days. The organizing committee included Marta Manser, Damien Farine, Anna Lindholm, and Lucy Aplin. Dr. Zegni Triki was this year’s Tinbergen Awardee. The award for best poster, sponsored by PeerJ, went to Dr. Ana Cerveira for her poster “Know thy food: Cyrba algerina’s (Araneae, Salticidae) response to prey cues requires previous experience”. Session topics included a wide range of interesting themes, such as animal personality, social behaviour, physiology and behaviour, cooperation, conservation and behaviour, foraging, communication, movement ecology, sex and reproduction, parental care, collective behavior, and of course long-term studies.
Megan Wyman (ECBB)
Ana Cerveira Assistant Researcher at Aveiro University, Portugal.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your research interests?
I am a behavioural ecologist at CESAM’s research centre at Aveiro University. I’m mostly interested in the visual and chemical ecology of jumping spiders. Currently, I am also working with fossorial voles, studying their social behaviour. More recently, I developed an interest in illustration as a means to communicate and share science visually (see below!). By creating illustrations for scientific publications, press releases, and outreach activities, I hope to convey scientific information in a simple and appealing way to both expert and non-expert communities.
What first interested you in this field of research?
From my early days as a Biology student, I was always captivated by the immense diversity of the invertebrate world and the amazing and bizarre forms it takes. I became especially interested in jumping spiders after doing an internship in Robert Jackson’s Spider Lab at the Canterbury University. I had the opportunity to work on several small projects, mostly looking at the predatory strategies of different spider families. Jumping spiders stood out. The remarkable behavioural complexity they demonstrate is astonishing, especially considering how small their brain is. They also have impressive visual abilities, which, combined with other sensory modalities, make them exceptional predators and, of course, extremely interesting from a researcher’s point of view.
Can you briefly explain the research you presented at ECBB 2024?
Most jumping spiders studied to date will respond to the visual and chemical cues of their most common or preferred prey. Responsiveness to prey cues often varies geographically, being fine-tuned to the prey available locally. This ability is usually innate, meaning that they can identify prey visually or through chemical cues without having had any prior contact with it. To our surprise, Cyrba algerina, the species I was working with, did not. Although Cyrba collected in the field responded to cues from some local prey species, naïve individuals, reared in the lab, would not.
To understand what was going on, we decided to rear them in the lab and condition them to the cues of sympatric and allopatric prey. We did this by either feeding Cyrba with the prey or by exposing them to prey odour cues. We then tested their responsiveness to these prey in vision- and odour-based choice tests.
We found that in Cyrba’s case, prior experience with prey is indeed necessary to elicit a response. This ability is not restricted to sympatric prey but also does not seem to extend to spiders in general. In fact, our results suggest that Cyrba has a bias for a particular spider family on which it usually preys, the family Oecobiidae, commonly known as the disc web spiders. While feeding elicits a visual- and odour-based preference for both allopatric and sympatric oecobiid species, exposure to odour cues only triggers a visual-based preference for both these prey, despite never having had access to their visual cues. Our results suggest that in Cyrba’s case, fine-tuning to local prey probably occurs during development, being shaped through exposure to the prey available at each site.
Although, to our knowledge, this has never been described for other jumping spiders, we think it could be a consequence of Cyrba having an especially wide geographical distribution. While being innately proficient at capturing specific prey should be advantageous – as it provides individuals with an immediate and fine-tuned response to prey, if the prey available varies considerably between sites, then phenotypic plasticity might be more advantageous, allowing each single individual to adjust to the particular prey available at each site based on their previous experience.
How will you continue to build on this research?
There is still much to know. For instance, does Cyrba have an innate bias towards other common or preferred prey species? Or how much exposure is necessary for individuals to respond to these prey? Can it be triggered at any life stage? These are all questions worth pursuing. Given my recently found interest in illustrating science, I would also like to take advantage of working with what are probably some of the cutest invertebrates around and use them as ambassadors of their kind to show how complex and fascinating the invertebrate world is.
