The hunting spider Cupiennius salei uses airflow generated by flying insects for the guidance of its prey-capture jump. We investigated the velocity field of the airflow generated by a freely flying blowfly close to the flow sensors on the spider's legs. It shows three characteristic phases (I-III). (I) When approaching, the blowfly induces an airflow signal near the spider with only little flu...

According to the crypsis hypothesis, the ability of female crab spiders to change body colour and match the colour of flowers has been selected because flower visitors are less likely to detect spiders that match the colour of the flowers used as hunting platform. However, recent findings suggest that spider crypsis plays a minor role in predator detection and some studies even showed that poll...

Trophic cascades are regarded as important signals for top-down control of food web dynamics. Although there is clear evidence supporting the existence of trophic cascades, the mechanisms driving this important dynamic are less clear. Trophic cascades could arise through direct population-level effects, in which predators prey on herbivores, thereby decreasing the abundance of herbivores that i...

We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire on a triangular board of arbitrary size. The basic game begins from a full board with one peg missing and finishes with one peg at a specified board location. We develop necessary and sufficient conditions for this game to be solvable. For all solvable problems, we give an explicit solution algorithm. On the 15-hole board, we compare three simple...

Clobber is a new two-player board game. In this paper, we introduce the 1-player variant Solitaire Clobber where the goal is to remove as many stones as possible from the board by alternating white and black moves. We show that a checkerboard configuration on a single row (or single column) can be reduced to about n/4 stones. For boards with at least two rows and columns, we show that a checker...

Primates are now known to possess well-developed olfactory sensitivity and discrimination capacities that can play a substantial role in many aspects of their interaction with conspecifics and the environment. Several studies have demonstrated that olfactory cues may be useful in fruit selection. Here, using a conditioning paradigm, we show that captive spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) display...

Hawaiian Tetragnatha spiders inhabiting small forest fragments on the Big Island of Hawaii are parasitized by mermithid nematodes. This is the first report of mermithid nematodes infecting spiders in Hawaii, and an initial attempt to characterize this host-parasite interaction. Because immature mermithids were not morphologically identifiable, a molecular identification was performed. A phyloge...

Purpose – This study seeks to develop a novel eight-legged robot. Additionally, this study defines design and control of an eight-legged single actuator walking ROBOTURK SA-2 spider robot based on the features of a creatural spider. Design/methodology/approach – First, the single actuator eight-legged tetrapod walking spider robot was modeled on solid works and then the animation of the model w...

O R IG IN A L PA ER Abstract Multi-shot pulse-shape measurements of trains of ultrashort pulses with unstable pulse shapes are studied. Measurement techniques considered include spectral-phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction (SPIDER), second harmonic generation frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG), polarization gate FROG, and cross-correlation FROG. An analytical cal...