The idea of a complex spider society—in which thousands of spiders live, hunt, and raise their young together in a single colony—is unsettling to many of us. We are perhaps lucky then that this scene is relatively rare among arachnids. Among the 40,000 known species of spiders, the vast majority live solitary lives and will often show aggression toward other spiders they encounter, even within their own species. There are <25 known species of social spiders, distributed broadly across six different families and nine different genera. Not only do these spiders live in social groups, but also they produce populations that grow over time as new offspring are added to the nest, enabling the capture of increasingly large prey as the colony expands, and even give rise to new daughter colonies. As social creatures ourselves, humans have long been interested in the evolutionary innovations that enable social cooperation. In a new article in Genome Biology and Evolution titled “Comparative genomics identifies putative signatures of sociality in spiders,” researchers provide one of the first glimpses into the genetic underpinnings for how a solitary spider evolves into a social one.

中文翻译：

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亮点-解开蜘蛛社会性的遗传基础

复杂的蜘蛛社会的想法-成千上万的蜘蛛在一个殖民地生活，狩猎和抚养幼崽-使我们许多人感到不安。那时我们也许很幸运，这种场面在蜘蛛类动物中相对罕见。在40,000种已知的蜘蛛物种中，绝大多数人过着孤独的生活，即使对它们自己的物种，也常常表现出对他们遇到的其他蜘蛛的攻击性。已知少于25种的社会蜘蛛物种广泛分布在六个不同的家族和九个不同的属中。这些蜘蛛不仅生活在社会群体中，而且随着新的后代被添加到巢中，它们产生的种群也会随着时间的增长而增长，随着种群的扩大，甚至随着新的女儿殖民地的出现，它们也能够捕获越来越多的猎物。作为我们自己的社交生物，长期以来，人类一直对促进社会合作的进化创新感兴趣。在一篇新文章中基因组生物学与进化的标题为“比较基因组学识别蜘蛛社会性的推定特征”，研究人员提供了关于孤独蜘蛛如何演变为社会蜘蛛的遗传基础的第一印象。