Spider resting interaction networks

Edge list of spider resting interactions. 24 groups of 10 adult female spiders, from 3 source colonies. Groups had one of three boldness compositions: all bold spiders, all shy spiders, and 9 shy individuals with one bold individual. Overall, these groups contained more initially shy individuals than bold individuals because this represents the spiders’ natural boldness distribution. We manually recorded the physical contacts among spiders three times a week, during the day, while spiders are inactive for long periods of time. Therefore, we refer to these interactions as ‘resting interactions’ and define an interaction as a physical contact between any body parts of two spiders, when the colony is not active. Colony activity is minimal in the lab (initial web construction and collective predation when fed) and most of the time spiders are resting. Therefore, observing their interactions every 2-3 days samples most social interactions. We used the interactions to construct unweighted (binary), undirected (symmetrical), networks for each spider group during each observation. Spiders were collected from roadside Acacia trees in the Northern Cape of South Africa in March 2016. Groups were housed in large round containers (11cm diameter, 10cm depth) with a vertical wire mesh (a 5x5cm sheet) to allow the spiders to build both a retreat and a capture web. Experimental observations were made during June-August, 2016.