If an expectant mother knew that dangerous creatures lurked around her, and knew also that she wouldn’t be around to take care of her young, she might be stressed.
And if she had a way to warn her young before they were born, surely she would.
Human mothers cannot do this, to the best of our knowledge. But pregnant crickets, it appears, do have the ability to forewarn. This is especially useful since crickets abandon their young after birth.
Researchers from the University of South Carolina Upstate and Indiana State University placed pregnant crickets in an enclosure where they were stalked, but not eaten, by a wolf spider, whose fangs had been coated with wax to protect the crickets.
The young of the spider-exposed mothers turned out to be more predator-savvy than those with mothers who were not exposed to the wolf spider; they stayed hidden longer, and were more likely to freeze when they encountered spider feces or spider silk.
In a second experiment, the researchers placed the juvenile crickets in an arena with a starving wolf spider with fully functioning fangs. Eventually, the spider got all the crickets, but the young born from spider-exposed mothers lasted longer in the arena of death.
The research was published last month in The American Naturalist.
What remains unclear is exactly how the crickets are warning their unborn. “We don’t know a specific mechanism,” said Jonathan Storm, a professor at the University of South Carolina Upstate in Spartanburg and one of the authors of the paper.
Although it is conjecture at this point, he said, “It’s possible that there could be some sort of hormone transmitted.”
Sindya N. Bhanoo, New York Times
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Full article and photo:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/science/23obcrick.html
