What if your entire personality could change within a few weeks? For social “hippie” spiders, that’s exactly what happens, according to groundbreaking research that challenges how scientists understand animal individuality.
A team led by the University of Portsmouth tracked African social spiders (Stegodyphus dumicola) over four months, testing their behavior every two weeks. Unlike previous studies that only examined spider personalities over a few days, this comprehensive approach revealed something unexpected: spider personalities don’t stick around.
“Our study raises the question of whether these spiders truly have personalities at all,” said Dr. Lena Grinsted, Senior Lecturer in Zoology at the University of Portsmouth and lead author of the study. “We found that their behavior fluctuates so much that it’s misleading to classify individuals as having stable personality traits.”
The researchers measured three key behaviors in 28 spider colonies: boldness (how quickly spiders recover after a simulated threat), fleeing responses, and prey capture speed in group settings. While individual spiders initially showed consistent behaviors, these patterns changed dramatically within weeks. Most surprisingly, a spider’s initial behavior couldn’t predict how it would act later in life.
This discovery contradicts the common definition of personality as behavior that remains consistent across time and contexts. The findings suggest that social spiders, which live in cooperative communities where they hunt together and collectively raise young, may have a more fluid social structure than previously thought.
“It’s tempting to assume that these cooperative spiders have defined roles within their societies, just as we see in some other social animals, like ants,” Dr. Grinsted explained. “However, our findings suggest they may instead live in an even more equal society than expected, where individuals participate in tasks as needed rather than being locked into specific behavioral roles.”
The results have significant implications for behavioral ecology research, particularly studies linking animal personality to evolutionary outcomes. Scientists have previously suggested that personality differences might drive task specialization and influence reproductive success in social spiders. This new evidence challenges those assumptions.
“Our humble ‘hippie’ spiders have demonstrated how categorizing individuals into ‘bold’, ‘shy’ or ‘aggressive’ based on a few observations is not just inaccurate, it may lead to wrong conclusions about evolutionary outcomes,” said Dr. Grinsted. “So, much like people, you can’t judge a spider on first impressions and they’re not a fan of labels either!”
The study, published in Animal Behaviour, represents a collaboration between the University of Portsmouth, Aarhus University (Denmark), University of Paris-Saclay (France), and LMU (Germany). It calls for more rigorous approaches in animal personality research, emphasizing the importance of tracking behavior over longer periods before drawing conclusions about personality traits.
For the free-spirited “hippie” spiders, it seems that fluidity and adaptability, rather than fixed personality traits, might be their true evolutionary advantage. Just like their human counterparts, these cooperative arachnids appear to resist being boxed into rigid categories – suggesting that in some social species, flexibility trumps consistency.
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