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Downloaded Corresponding Sequences, from Genbank, for 12 P 2016 AAS Abstracts The American Arachnological Society 40th Annual Meeting July 2-9, 2016 Golden, Colorado Paula Cushing Return to Abstracts Return to Meetings AAS Home Presentation Abstracts (Presenters underlined, * denotes participation in student competition) Abstracts of keynote speakers are listed first in order of presentation, followed by other abstracts in alphabetical order by first author. Underlined indicates presenting author, *indicates presentation in student competition. Only students with an * are in the competition. PLENARY presentation – Sunday, July 3 Trans-taxa: Spiders that dress as ants Ximena Nelson School of Biological Sciences, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand [email protected] Batesian mimicry is a classic evolutionary phenomenon whereby animals experience reduced predation as a consequence of their resemblance to noxious, dangerous or unpalatable animals. Jumping spiders (Salticidae) are the largest family of spiders, and the genus Myrmarachne, with over 220 species, is the largest among the salticids. Myrmarachne are all ant-like spiders and appear to be Batesian mimics, using both appearance and behaviour to enhance their resemblance to ants. The interactions of ants, Myrmarachne and non-ant-like salticids provide a framework to thoroughly explore Batesian mimicry theory. In particular, I will discuss the effects of behavioural mimicry and costs associated with Batesian mimicry, including species recognition and effects of sexual selection. Keywords: mimicry, Salticidae, Myrmarachne, ant-like PLENARY presentation – Monday, July 4 Spider phylogenomics: untangling the spider tree of life Jason Bond Biological Sciences, Auburn University, Alabama, USA [email protected] Phylogenomic inference is transforming systematic biology by allowing systematists to confidently resolve many major branches of the Tree of Life, even for ancient groups that may have diversified quickly and are systematically 2016 AAS Abstracts difficult. Spiders are massively abundant generalist predators that are found in nearly every ecosystem on the planet and have persisted for over 380 million years. In addition to tremendous species diversity and importance in terrestrial ecosystems, they are also known for their extraordinary biomaterials like silks and venoms. The group has long provided evolutionary models for studying complex mating and web spinning behaviors, key innovation and adaptive radiation hypotheses, and has been inspiration for important theories like sexual selection by female choice. Past attempts to reconstruct spider phylogeny using standard molecular markers have been unable to produce a well-supported phylogenetic framework for the entire order. I will discuss a number of current efforts, in collaboration with others, to further resolve spider phylogenetic relationships using transcriptome and other genomics-based data. These data provide considerable insight into our understanding of web evolution, rates of diversification across the order, and seemingly indicate that major changes in spider classification are likely warranted. PLENARY presentation – Tuesday, July 5 Evolution of Spider Silk Genes Cheryl Hayashi Department of Biology, University of California Riverside, California, USA [email protected] Spiders are unparalleled among arthropods for the many types of silks they spin. Silks are mostly protein and this presentation will focus on the genes that encode the silk proteins. I will trace the history of advances made in characterizing spider silk genes, from the initial gene-by-gene cloning efforts to recent transcriptomic and genomic studies. The most well known silk genes belong to a single gene family, the spidroin gene family, and analyses have shown that spidroin gene evolution has been dramatically shaped by gene duplication, followed by episodes of divergence and conservation. However, spidroins are not the entire story of spider silk, there are other silk proteins, and they, too, are members of gene families. The evolutionary diversification of serial homologs, whether they are morphological (silk glands, spigots, spinnerets, etc.) or molecular (silk genes, iterated amino acid sequence motifs), is a major theme in understanding spider silk production. PLENARY presentation – Thursday, July 7 Evolution of paternal care in harvestmen: devoted fathers or selfish lovers? Glauco Machado Departamento de Ecologia, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil [email protected] Exclusive paternal care is probably the rarest form of post-zygotic parental investment in nature. This behavior is known to have independently evolved in 16 arthropod lineages, nine of them belonging to the small order Opiliones, which comprises nearly 6,500 species. Thus, harvestmen offer unique opportunities to test hypotheses on the evolution of exclusive paternal. In this talk, I will first review the theoretical background on sex roles and parental care, contrasting classical views with the most recent mathematical models. Then, I will present a series of studies conducted by my research group using Neotropical harvestmen as study systems. Using both field observations and experiments, we contrasted predictions from different theoretical models and evaluated costs and benefits of paternal care. Our findings indicate that paternal care increases males’ attractiveness to females. Moreover, we show that paternal care confers high benefits to the offspring when compared to relatively low costs to the males in terms of decreasing survival and foraging rates. To conclude, I will integrate the available information for harvestmen and other arthropod species in order to derive general conclusions on the evolution of paternal care. Keywords: paternal care, sexual selection, costs and benefits, Opiliones, sex roles. PLENARY presentation – Friday, July 8 How the brown recluse got its bite: evolutionary assembly of spider venoms Greta Binford Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon, USA [email protected] Venoms are complex phenotypes with a large and diverse set of interacting molecular components. Spider venoms have particularly deep evolutionary histories, and are strikingly complex. We have much to learn about the structure 2016 AAS Abstracts of variability in venoms and factors that influence major evolutionary changes in venom function. I will discuss ongoing work to understand how spiders in the family Sicariidae, including the brown recluse, evolved their unique venoms that have toxins that are insecticidal and cause dermonecrosis in mammals (sphingomyelinase D toxins in the SicTox gene family). In the context of the biology and evolutionary history of these animals, I will discuss our improving understanding of the timing and circumstance of the evolutionary recruitment of the SicTox lineage for insecticidal venom function. I will also present comparative venomic data that integrates HiSeq transcriptomes of venom glands, and Orbitrap proteomic analyses that characterize gene families contributing to venom protetomes. This will include comparative analyses of evolutionary dynamics of these gene family lineages. Our dataset includes sampling across representatives of diverse sicariids with common ancestry spanning ~ 10-100 million years, and a range of non-sicariid haplogyne spiders including three taxa in their sister lineage (Drymusa, Periogops, and Scytodes) and other haplogynes including pholcids and plectreurids. Regular Sessions Student - oral presentation The mechanisms of chemical communication in Tetragnatha spiders *Seira Ashley Adams1, Rosemary Gillespie1, Gabriele Uhl2 1Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management University of California, Berkeley, 130 Mulford Hall #3114, Berkeley, CA 94720-3114, USA; 2Department of General and Systematic Zoology, Zoological Institute and Museum, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, Anklamer Str. 20, D-17489 Greifswald, Germany [email protected] The mechanisms by which reproductive isolation evolves and is maintained is central to understanding fundamental processes of evolution. Chemical cues are one of the most ancient and widespread modalities of communication, yet their importance in species recognition and reproductive isolation remains largely unknown. My work will focus on the role of chemical communication in reproductive isolation and speciation within the Tetragantha spider family where visual and auditory cues appear to play little or no role in species recognition during mating. Keywords: chemical communication, pheromones, sexual behavior, Tetragnatha spiders, species recognition Oral presentation De novo genomes of orb-weaving spiders reveal the diversity and complexity of spidroins Ingi Agnarsson1, Paul L. Babb2,3, Nicholas F. Lahens2,4, David N. Nicholson1,2, Eun Ji Kim2,4, Linden Higgins1, John B. Hogenesch2,4, Matjaž Kuntner5, Benjamin F. Voight2,3,4 1Department of Biology, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405, USA; 2Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA; 3Department of Genetics, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA; 4Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA; 5EZ Lab, Institute of Biology at Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia. [email protected] Spider silks are the toughest known biomaterials,
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