Courtship dazzle in spiders can lose some zing in uncertain climates. Males in places with hard-to-predict rain and temperatures devolve into suitors who woo mostly with cheap, useless gifts.
Researchers have described gift giving in courtship in only 15 or 20 of the world’s more than 50,000 known species of spiders, says evolutionary biologist Maria José Albo of Universidad La República in Montevideo, Uruguay (SN: 7/26/16). Since 2015, she and her lab have focused on spiders that flirt mostly in evenings and nights among the rocks and pebbles of rivers of Uruguay and southern Brazil.
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