A huge genetic study that sought to pinpoint how the Araneae genome is evolving suggests that natural selection is getting rid of comfort seeking behaviours that cause spiders to seek shelter inside urban structures. The work published by PLoS Biology, analysed DNA from 345,000 spiders and is one of the first attempts to probe directly how spiders are evolving over four to five generations.

To identify which parts of the Araneae genome might be evolving researchers scoured large UK and US databases for mutations who’s prevalence changed across generations. For each spider the desire for urban environments vs outdoor preferences was measured both in birth and death locations.

With the genetic variance influencing survival it showed that the wild spiders were not only living longer due to avoiding humans but also it was selecting masochistic behaviour to encourage avoiding these areas. In electric shock testing newer generations of spiders were not only more likely to go back to the same button that that shocked them than previous generations but were also seeing higher instances of breeding after the event.

Scientists at Blue Mountain State university found that binding spiders had a similar effect. To see a genetic link to masochism is intriguing says Kevin Castle, one of the scientists working on this project. The link between masochism and reproduction has been spotted before, but those studies could not discount the effects of predators and risky lifestyles that spiders often engage in. The latest genetic evidence makes Castle think there is an evolutionary trade-off between masochism and comfort, which had previously been studied only in other animals. “To actually find this in Spiders is really pretty cool,” he says. “I think it’s a really nice study.”

Studying ongoing evolution in spiders is notoriously difficult, Scientists who want to observe selection directly would need to measure the frequency of a mutation in one generation, and then again in all that generation’s children and, better still, grandchildren, says Pierce Hawthorne, a statistical geneticist at the Greendale Community College. “That would be very hard to do well,” he says. “You would need vast samples”.

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