Behavioral corroboration that Saitis barbipes jumping spiders cannot discriminate between males’ red and black ornaments

Abstract

Physiological or genetic assays and computational modeling are valuable tools for understanding animals’ visual discrimination capabilities. Yet sometimes, the results generated by these methods appear not to jive with other aspects of an animal’s appearance or natural history, and behavioral confirmatory tests are warranted. Here we examine the peculiar case of a male jumping spider that displays red, black, white, and UV color patches during courtship despite the fact that, according to microspectrophotometry and color vision modeling, they are unlikely able to discriminate red from black. To test whether some optical or neurological component could have been missed using these methods, we conduct mate choice experiments. Some females are presented with a choice between males with their red leg coloration painted over with either red or black paint, while other females are presented with a choice between males with the same coloration painted over by either red or white paint. This latter pairing of red and white males should have been easily distinguishable to the spiders and served as a control to ensure our experimental setup was conducive to natural mating behavior. Red males were more likely to mate than white males (P = 0.035), whereas red and black males had identical mating success (P = 1.0). This suggests that previous physiological and computational work on these spiders was correct in concluding that they are unable to discriminate between red and black. Any functional significance of displaying both colors, rather than only black, remains unresolved.