Spider with lost personality

What if your entire personality can change in a few weeks? For social “hippie” spiders, this is exactly what happens, based on groundbreaking research challenging scientists how to understand animal personality.

A team led by the University of Portsmouth tracked African social spiders (Stegodyphus Dumicola) for four months, testing their behavior every two weeks. Unlike previous studies that examined spider personality only in a few days, this comprehensive approach reveals what was unexpected: spider personality won’t stick to it.

“Our study raises the question of whether these spiders have a true personality,” said Dr. Lena Grinsted, senior lecturer in zoology at the University of Portsmouth and lead author of the study. “We found that their behavior fluctuated so much that it was misleading to classify individuals as having stable personality traits.”

The researchers measured three key behaviors in 28 spider colonies: bold (the speed at which spiders recover after simulating threats), escape response, and prey capture speed in group settings. Although individual spiders initially showed consistent behavior, these patterns changed dramatically in a few weeks. Most surprisingly, the spider’s initial behavior cannot predict its future life.

This finding contradicts the shared definition of personality with the shared definition of behavior that is consistent between time and environment. The results show that social spiders living in cooperative communities where they hunt together and jointly enhance young people may have a smoother social structure than previously thought.

“It is easy to assume that these cooperative spiders have defined roles in their society, as we have seen in some other social animals, such as ants,” explains Dr. Grinsted. “However, our findings suggest that they may live in a more equal society than expected, where individuals can participate in tasks as needed, rather than being locked into specific behavioral roles.”

The results are of great significance to the study of behavioral ecology, especially the study that links animal personality with evolutionary results. Scientists have previously suggested that personality differences may drive task specialization and affect reproductive success of social spiders. This new evidence challenges these assumptions.

“Our modest ‘hippie’ spider has proven that the way to categorize individuals as “bold,” “shy,” or “positive” based on some observations is not only inaccurate, but can also lead to false conclusions about evolutionary outcomes,” said Dr. Grinsted. “So, like people, you can’t judge spiders on the first impression, and they don’t like labels either!”

The study, published in animal behavior, represents a collaboration between the University of Portsmouth, Aarhus University (Denmark), Paris-Saclay University (France) and LMU (Germany). It requires a more rigorous approach in animal personality studies and emphasizes the importance of tracking behavior over a longer period of time before reaching conclusions about personality traits.

For free-spirited “hippie” spiders, it seems that mobility and adaptability rather than fixed personality traits may be their true evolutionary advantage. Like their human counterparts, these collaborative spider webs seem to resist being boxed into rigid categories – suggesting that flexibility trumps consistency in some social species.

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