Keeping a low profile (Image: Jonathan Stocm)
A MOTHER’S care sometimes knows no bounds. It turns out that crickets manage to forewarn their offspring of lurking spiders, despite the small matter of never actually meeting them.
Jonathan Storm, a behavioural ecologist now at the University of South Carolina Upstate, in Spartanburg, briefly exposed lab-grown female crickets to wolf spiders whose fangs had been immobilised with wax, then studied the behaviour of their subsequent offspring.
He found that their offspring remained motionless for longer in the presence of spider silk or droppings than the offspring of mothers that had not been…
