Eyeliner on spiders: UF researchers experiment with makeup and insects

UF researchers have been using makeup to alter the color patterns of certain spiders to see how it affects their mating or hunting behaviors.

Lisa Taylor, a 39-year-old UF assistant research scientist, has always expressed an interest in color and art. It wasn’t until she took an animal behavior class and a spider biology class at the same time, however, that she said she realized there was a colorful family of animals that hadn’t been studied much.

Jumping spiders became her focus in 2005. Nine years later, Taylor came to UF and started researching how the spiders interacted with color.

Certain male spiders are like peacocks: colorful, loud and dancing for the attention of a female. The colors of male jumping spiders vary across more than 6,000 species. Some have bright red faces or bold black and white stripes, while others have green legs.

The purpose is to look like an appealing mate instead of an appetizing meal for the cannibalistic females, she said.

“It’s an unusual balance of information the male has to send,” Taylor said. “We think the males are kind of exploiting females by putting these bright colors on their faces in order to tap into the female psychology and take advantage of the fact that the females don’t like eating those things.”

Color patterns, like red or black and white stripes, can often signal that a prey is toxic to eat.

To figure out how important the colors are, Taylor and her team of about 10 people decided to change the colors with makeup, which is non-toxic and can be applied delicately.

Taylor said she started going into Sephora with little cardboard cards to sample the makeup and bring it back to the lab to measure the properties.

“I got a lot of weird looks,” Taylor said. “Sometimes, I’d tell them what I’m doing if I’m looking for a particular color. Usually, they’re really interested.”

Taylor used black liquid eyeliner in some cases to cover up patterns on jumping spiders’ faces. She discovered a foundation powder would cover green legs.

With at least one species, covering up the color with black eyeliner increased the chances the female would attack the male, Taylor said. In general, they found female jumping spiders pay attention to color differently depending on the lighting.

“We had a realization that these spiders have sophisticated cognitive abilities,” she said. “Jumping spiders are tiny animals with tiny brains, but they make complex decisions.”

For the past two years, Michael Vickers, a graduate research assistant working on the team, has been experimenting with the idea that jumping spiders respond to multiple signals.

“You can focus on colors as the main signal, however, there’s other things that are going on. There’s always questions that we can ask from this major question of colors as signals,” Vickers, 39, said.

In experiments, they would create an odor from chemically defendant bugs, which are toxic to eat, and add that to the male spiders with red patterns. He said the females were less likely to attack males when the odor was added and in some cases, they’d even start to avoid the color red.

“They can learn color when another stimulus is added. Jumping spiders have one of the best eye sights of all arthropods,” Vickers said.

Follow Jessica Curbelo on Twitter @jesscurbelo and contact her at jcurbelo@alligator.org.