SCIENCE LAB SCOOPS : SPIDERS VS FIREFLIES

 

Step into my parlor? Nah, visit my light show instead : Imagine being a male firefly when suddenly the telltale flashing of a female catches your eye.

Enthralled, you speed toward love's embrace -only to fly headfirst into a spider's web. That flashy female was in fact another male firefly,  himself trapped in the web, and the spider may have manipulated his light beacon to lure you in.

This high-stakes drama plays out nightly in the Jiangxia District of Wuhan, China. There, researchers have found that male fireflies caught in the webs of the orb-weaver spider Araneus ventricosus flash their light signals more in the manner of females, which leads other males to get snagged in the same web.

And weirdly, the spiders might be making them do this, the way hunters blow a duck call to attract prey.

'' The idea that a spider can manipulate the signaling of a prey species is very intriguing,'' said Dinesh Rao, a spider biologist at the University of Veracruz in Mexico.

Dr. Rao was not involved in the research but served as a peer reviewer of the paper in the journal Current Biology.

Xinhua Fu, a zoologist in Wuhan, was in the field surveying firefly diversity when he noticed that male fireflies seemed to end up ensnared in orb-weaver spider webs more often than females.

Female-like flashing seemed to act as a siren song for other male fireflies, with those webs catching an average of 1.6 more males compared with just 0.2 more males for webs without female-like flickerings. [ Darren Incorvaia ].