I have been fortunate to be awarded a small Royal Society International Exchanges grant together with my Panamanian collaborator, Dr Dumas Galvez, from the University of Panama. The research project build on work I did during my postdoc at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute back in 2009 on the association of the orb spider Eustala illicita with the ant acacias. In Panama there are two different such model systems with one Eustala species associating with acacias on the Pacific side and another species of Eustala associating with a different species of acacias in the central and Caribbean side. However, we know very little on how these spiders avoid getting attacked by the aggressive resident ants and how they manage to locate the specific host species in the first place. In this preliminary project, we will look at the cuticular hydrocarbons of ants and spiders, and plant volatiles in order to see if chemical mimicry is being used by the spiders, and we will investigate if spiders are attracted to chemical cues from the ants or plants in laboratory T-maze experiments.
In addition I am also supervising an Oxford MBIOL student who will do his Master’s project on this system. The plan is to build on the success of this Royal Society grant to establish the spider-ant-acacias association as a model systems for studies on chemical mimicry, chemical attraction and host plant location in the future.
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