Cricket mothers warn offspring about spiders before they hatch

Cricket mothers warn offspring about spiders before they hatch [5 yrs ago]

Cricket mothers are long gone by the time their infants hatch, so one would assume that cricket parents have little effect on their offspring's behavior. Not so, according to a new study in the American Naturalist which proves that mother crickets have the potential to teach their offspring—while still in their eggs—about the hazards of spiders. To test how crickets learn to avoid spiders, researchers covered a wolf spiders' fangs with wax to render it harmless and then placed it into an enclosure with pregnant crickets. The spider could hunt the crickets to its heart's desire, but couldn't kill them. A second enclosure was left spider-free. When the baby crickets hatched, researchers discovered major behavioral differences between the crickets whose mothers had faced stalking spiders and those from the spider-free enclosure. Crickets from spider-exposed mothers proved far...

Full article: http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0221-hance_crickets.html?tw...