COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF DICTYNA AND MALLOS: 
V. TOLERANCE AND RESISTANCE TO STARVATION 
By Robert R. Jackson* 
North Carolina Mental Health Research 
Anderson Hall, Dorothea Dix Hospital 
Raleigh, North Carolina 27611 
Introduction 
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in social 
spiders (recent review: Krafft, 1979); and in particular, efforts have 
begun to compare the social adaptations that have evolved in spiders 
with those known for insects (Wilson, 1971). 
Kullmann (1968, 1972) emphasized cooperation, interattraction, 
and tolerance as essential characteristics that distinguish social from 
solitary spiders. Cooperation refers to social spiders working together 
in some sense, and interattraction concerns the formation of groups 
due to conspecific spiders attracting each other. Tolerance refers to 
the non-aggressive, and especially, the non-cannibalistic nature of 
social spiders. 
In a group of closely related web-building spiders from the dictynid 
genera Mallos and Dictyna, there is considerable interspecific 
variation in social organization (Jackson, 1978a). Comparative 
studies of these provide a means by which the particular qualities of 
sociality occurring in spiders can be assessed. 
Earlier studies have been especially concerned with interattraction 
(Jackson, 1981), cooperation (Jackson, 1979a), and other aspects of 
the biology of these spiders (e.g., Jackson, 1978b; Witt, etal., 1978). 
Burgess (1979) considered a particular aspect of tolerance, the 
vibratory stimuli that elicit predatory behavior and how these differ 
from the vibrations produced by conspecific spiders. The present 
study considers some additional questions about tolerance and 
related comparative aspects of the biology of dictynid spiders. 
Most species in these genera are solitary, living one spider per web, 
except for the common exception of cohabiting male-female pairs 
‘Present Address: Department of Zoology, University of Canterbury, Christ¬ 
church 1, New Zealand 
Manuscript received by the editor November 12, 1980. 
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