Artificial light at night alters life history in a nocturnal orb-web spider
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Entomology, Zoology
- Keywords
- orb weaving spider, life history, urbanisation, artificial light at night, development
- Copyright
- © 2018 Willmott et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Artificial light at night alters life history in a nocturnal orb-web spider. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26943v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26943v1
Abstract
The prevalence of artificial light at night (ALAN) is increasing rapidly around the world. The potential physiological costs of this night lighting are often evident in life history shifts. We investigated the effects of chronic night-time exposure to ecologically relevant levels of LED lighting on the life history traits of the nocturnal Australian garden orb-web spider (Eriophora biapicata). We reared spiders under a 12-hour day and either a 12-hour natural darkness (~0 lux) or a 12-hour dim light (~20 lux) night and assessed juvenile development, growth and mortality, and adult reproductive success and survival. We found that exposure to ALAN accelerated juvenile development, resulting in spiders progressing through fewer moults, and maturing earlier and at a smaller size. There was a significant increase in daily juvenile mortality for spiders reared under 20 lux, but the earlier maturation resulted in a comparable number of 0 lux and 20 lux spiders reaching maturity. Exposure to ALAN also considerably reduced the number of eggs produced by females, largely associated with ALAN-induced reductions in body size. Despite previous observations of increased fitness for some orb-weavers in urban areas and near night lighting, it appears that exposure to artificial night lighting may lead to considerable developmental costs. Future research will need to consider the detrimental effects of ALAN combined with foraging benefits when studying nocturnal insectivores that forage around artificial lights.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Spectral composition of LED lights used in rearing experiment
Spectral composition of the cool white LED lights (12V DC cool white LED strip lighting supplied by World of Thought, Victoria, Australia) used during rearing experiment. The blue peak wavelength is 445nm.
Raw data for developmental effects of artificial light at night
This file contains the raw data for growth rates (time and mass) for spiders in the two light treatment groups.