Floral spatial morphological characteristics preferences facilitate mating and predation in flower-visiting spiders

Numerous flower visitors exhibit varying preferences for floral characteristics. As one group of flower visitors, the preferences of spiders for flower colour have garnered attention; however, their preferences for the spatial morphological characteristics of flowers remain largely unexplored. This study investigated the preferences of flower-visiting crab spiders Ebrechtella tricuspidata for flower size, petal density, and symmetry, and explored the underlying reasons from the courtship and predation. The results indicated that male spiders preferred larger flowers, while females favored densely petaled flowers and symmetrical flowers. Additionally, males exhibited a stronger preference for females that sitting on larger flowers than on smaller ones. Furthermore, consistent with spider preferences, the potential prey houseflies and honeybees, also showed a significant preference for larger, densely petaled, and symmetrical flowers in visitation experiments. We propose th..., We used E. tricuspidata spiders and odorless artificial L. maximum flowers to conduct all experiments. First, the preferences of E. tricuspidata for floral spatial morphological characteristics were assessed by offering spiders (a) large versus small flowers, (b) densely versus sparsely petaled flowers, and (c) symmetrical versus asymmetrical flowers. Second, the mating preferences of E. tricuspidata were examined by presenting males with females sitting on flowers with different characteristics. Third, we tested the visitation preferences of the potential prey of the spider for flowers with different characteristics., , This README_data was generated on 2024-03-07.

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This folder contains 3 files.

### 1. 1_spiders_choose_flowers.csv:

the results of experiment 1-6, female and male spiders choose flowers with different spatial morphological characteristics.

Number of variables: 5
Number of rows: 299

**Variable list**

* no.: the number of trials.
* treatment: the pair of flowers presented to the spiders.
* spider: the male and female spiders that choose between flowers.
* results: the choice made by spiders between flowers with varying spatial and morphological characteristics. In the \"large flower-small flower\" treatment, a refers to the female spider selecting the large flower, b to the small flower, c to the male spider selecting the large flower, and d to the small flower. In the \"densely petaled flower-sparsely petaled flower\" treatment, e refers to the female spider selecting the densely petaled flower, f to the sparsely petaled flower, g to t...,