Sensory exploitation of insect face cues by courting peacock spiders: A test using computer vision

Males use multiple tactics to capture and maintain female attention during courtship. These can include exploiting female sensory biases toward stimuli associated with foraging or shelter, as well as exploiting female anti-predatory responses. In the jumping spider genus Maratus, male courtship involves the display of complex abdominal patterning that for some species appears to mimic facial features of common jumping spider predators (e.g., wasps, mantids), at least to human observers.  We therefore hypothesized that some Maratus species have evolved predator-mimicking courtship displays to influence female behavior early in courtship. To evaluate this, we used computer-vision and machine learning to investigate the likelihood that a simulated female Maratus viewer might misclassify a courting male’s display as a predator face. We find that of 62 species/morphs studied, 13 are consistently misclassified as predator and/or prey insect faces at rates of 20% and greater. Additionally..., Images were collected from public online photography sharing sites, primarily Flickr. All *Maratus *images come from Jurgen Otto. Images were standardized using Adobe Photoshop CS5.1. Analysis in MATLAB uses the Histogram of Oriented Gradients feature extraction method and support vector machine multiclass classification, iteratively running 10 iterations of each of the four sighting distances for each of the four image sets. The Results folders include the results of all simulations for both the genus-wide analysis and the single-species analysis. Supplementary Table 1 shows the combined misclassification of *Maratus *across all simulations, sorted by species.
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[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.m37pvmdbq](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.m37pvmdbq)

Included are the image banks used to train and test the classifier as well as Excel workbooks containing the misclassification results for each tested condition, for both the genus-wide and the single-species tests. MatLab code given processes all four image types (fly, mantid, *Maratus*, wasp) across all 4 sighting distances (1cm, 2cm, 3cm, 5cm) - note that each sighting distance has a corresponding HOGExtractor function. 

### Image Banks

ImageBank_GenusWide.zip and ImageBank_SingleSpecies.zip each contain four folders describing the four image sets used by the classifier (Grey Background - Color; Grey Background - Greyscale; Natural Background - Color; and, Natural Background - Greyscale). Within each of these four folders are four folders, containing the edited images of fly faces,...,