 It's a real pleasure to be here for the Nebraska lecture and Jamie. Thank you to the University Research Council Your committee for the work that you put in and making selections for our Nebraska lecturers each of the semesters during the year and it's a real privilege today to have colleague Eileen habits as Our Nebraska lecturer for this afternoon Many of you know that Eileen is a professor in our school of biological sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences here on campus She's made numerous discoveries that have expanded scientific understanding about the evolution and function of animal signals Especially as they relate to I suspect what we're going to hear a lot about today Bracknitz in addition to her impressive research portfolio Eileen is a shining example of the important role that outreach plays in disseminating our faculty's knowledge throughout the state of Nebraska and around the world Although I probably should keep my true feelings about spiders to myself perhaps and I have a feeling many of you in the room Will relate to that. I'm excited for today's lecture because Eileen's taking us into What makes the scientific process exciting for so many of us discovery research? Engagement adventure memories and success and you might see that on the screen here behind me forming the acronym dream or a dream career and That's the message certainly that we want to send to our young people and to aspiring future scientists Thanks to her sense of adventure and willingness to persevere Eileen has a very impressive list of breakthroughs discovering the role of cannibalism in dark fishing spiders mating rituals Uncovering why arachnids native to the Florida Keys have such a sharp sense of smell and learning why certain species can breathe under water Overall her work has appeared in more than 100 Publications now those indeed are remarkable accomplishments in and of their own right But Eileen also has devoted her career to informal science education making discovery accessible to all And and also I would would relate from seeing Eileen in action Fun and I have a feeling you'll see some of that today as well She received funding from NSF to develop eight-legged encounters a set of activities and resources that help educators Caregivers and youth learn about the wonders of biology She's led summer camps science festivals classroom visits science communications courses and spider walks Hundreds of students across the state of Nebraska are more knowledgeable and curious because of her commitment Eileen has been here at UNL since 2005 She has a master's degree and a doctorate from the University of Arizona a master's degree from the University of Cincinnati and a bachelor's degree from Albion College and Most recently and I was able to be in the room when this award was presented this past year in 2017 Eileen receives the University of Nebraska's idea award standing for innovation development and engagement across the university system Recognizing her ability to do outreach and to reach so many people here and around the world So please join me in welcoming today's Nebraska lecturer. Dr. Eileen habits Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. I hope that I can live up to it I just want to say how excited I am to be this year's Nebraska lecture I want to thank the research council for choosing me and I believe Nathan Meyer Who's no longer here was the one who nominated me so I'd like to give a shout out to him as thanks And I want to say how honored I am ever since I've been here I've seen other people come up and give this lecture and to me They have just always been role models and I find it hard to believe that I'm actually that person up on stage today But what I'm going to talk to you about today is kind of my research history And I'm going to try and cover every facet of it and I want to start off by saying thank you Thank you all for being here for those of you who aren't here, but are watching and you've all told me that you're doing that So I know there are lots of you Including there's a women in STEM group at the science focus school at the zoo school who are together right now watching this Presentation, so thank you. I know there are some faculty that are home with their kids watching this presentation So thank you for being here and thank those of you who aren't able to be here But are watching and I also want to start off with a warning And I just want to say that some of the content and images of this presentation may make some viewers slightly uncomfortable And so because of that I want to start with a warm-up So I think you'd be hard-pressed to not say that this is adorable. It's so cute It's colorful. It has these big eyes just like most primates do But the rest of the pictures are not going to be like this so Well, this is our introduction to the rest of the talk and so the title of my talk is using arachnids to inspire dreams and I want to focus on this dream aspect and say that what I'm going to do today in my talk is I'm going to walk you through some discovery research engagement adventure memories and success that I have had with arachnids and Before we dive in I want to make sure that we're all on board with what we mean by arachnid So arthropods, these are these animals that are incredibly diverse. They're the most diverse group of animals They have a hard exoskeleton They have jointed appendages and the group that we are probably most familiar with that you are probably most familiar with Is the hexapods? So these are the insects They are closely related to the crustaceans the crabs and lobsters and then we have the myriapods These are centipedes and millipedes and then we have the calycerates So the calycerates are what we're going to focus on today and I want to start off just by asking who are the calycerates and Because it's after lunch. It's kind of late in the day This is when my energy level starts to kind of dive. I want some audience participation So I would like you to turn to the people next to you and come up with as many Calycerates as you can and count them and I'm going to give you about 30 seconds Okay, how many came up with at least three raise your hand? Excellent, how many came up with five fewer? How many came up with ten? All right, let's hear some of them I'm calling bluff All right crab spider, what are some others throughout some wolf spiders? Ticks scorpions Daddy long legs Ambulapigets tarantulas. All right horseshoe crabs excellent Colin. Yeah, so the calycerates are Actually the group that includes the horseshoe crabs this other group here They're called sea spiders, but then all in this kind of purplish pink color These are all the arachnids so they're actually 11 living orders of arachnids most people know maybe two or three scorpions spider, maybe ticks And the groups that we're going to focus on today are the Aranea, so these are the spiders and then the Ambulapigets and you're going to learn more than you probably want to know about Ambulapigets in today's talk, so these animals have two body parts. They have eight walking legs They have modified appendages up front that are called pedipelps and then they have modified mouth parts that are called Chalicerie and that's actually where the group gets its name Okay, so I'm going to start off with some stories about research and discovery Focusing on this group here the ambulapigets, so ambulapigets are tropical and subtropical They have eight legs you can actually count eight But if you notice this first pair of legs are really long and thin and they actually don't use these legs for Walking at all They're completely sensory structures and they're called antenna form legs because they use them in a similar way that insects use antennae So I knew about these animals because during my master's at Cincinnati I took an arachnology course and we learned about all the different groups and I saw animals Preserved in little vials like this of alcohol and they looked Interesting they looked okay, but they didn't really make any impression on me And then when I started my PhD, I took a tropical ecology course down in Costa Rica Through the organization for tropical studies and on my very first night on the course Several other students and I went out at night into the forest with our headlamps and I saw my first live Ambulapiget and it was It was almost a spiritual moment for me This animal was on a post about this high and it was big and it was sitting there just moving these legs in this Incredibly elegant seemingly purposeful way And I was just hooked I fell in love with them I started learning everything I could about them and it turns out there's not a whole lot known So it didn't take me all that long But what I did learn is that males when they are trying to court females they lay down this structure this stalked structure that's called a sperm metaphor and they lay sperm packets on to this structure and Try and guide a female over it or convince a female to walk over and I thought this is perfect I am interested in sexual selection This might be a system where males are really choosy because they're producing this structure The structure was thought to be costly and males couldn't build another one for another day or two So I thought great. This is what I'm going to study for my PhD So over Christmas break that year my parents were still living in Michigan And I went home for Christmas and I convinced my parents because I had no money as a grad student To hop in their RV and drive me down to Florida so that I could find these animals that I had never found before in North America So they're good sports and they we got in their RV and drove down to Florida Stopping along the side of the road flipping over logs or rocks I had no idea really what I was looking for But we finally made it to big pine key and I found my first amla-piget underneath a limestone rock literally on Christmas New Year's Eve. It was fantastic So I collected a bunch of animals I collected rocks and I drove back to Arizona where I was doing my PhD And I set up in the lab and I thought okay. I'm gonna use these limestone rocks This is what they're found on. They're completely nocturnal So I was doing all my work at night in the lab. So I had a red light And I thought this is the night I had my video camera set up. I put a male on top of the rock I went to grab the female. I just wanted to observe these interactions and the male disappeared And it turns out he ran underneath the rock So you could see these are really dorso-ventually flattened animals and this is where they normally live is on the underside of rocks So I thought well, that's not gonna work because I can't see anything So I got duct tape regular tape hot glue trying to devise some way of Creating a barrier on this rock to keep the animal on top So it's like 1 30 in the morning at this point and I suddenly had this epiphany that I could create an island so what if I take the bigger container and fill it with water so that only the top of the rock is Available so that's exactly what I did at 2 in the morning I thought this was just a stroke of genius and I put the animal on top and he kind of walked around to the edge I went to get the female. I was watching him. He walked around He's reaching out for the outer edge and he slipped and he fell into the water and he flipped underneath and he ran under the rock And I said what on earth so he disappears under the rock and I did what any good curious scientist would do and I started a stopwatch and 35 minutes later this male came back up and the whole time he was walking around underneath the water So of course the next day I came in and I covered the lab in Containers with water and limestone rocks. I put amylo pigeons on I chased them under the water And I recorded how long they could stay under and it turns out they could stay underwater a really long time So I was there all night More than nine hours these animals would stay underwater moving around the entire time and what they looked like underwater Is there's this kind of silvery sheen that you could see on their body so through a series of experiments where I actually depleted the water of oxygen In combination with doing some microscopy work using a scanning electron microscope to look at the cuticle I was able to find that in these little slits So what we're looking at is the bottom side of this body segment and these slits here Open up into the respiratory system of these animals They're called book lungs and if you look at this little opening in the book lung You see that the cuticle is built into these buttressed structures And it turns out that this buttressed cuticle Actually traps a layer of air in it and that layer of air acts as a physical gill So it covers the openings and as the animal respires Oxygen just diffuses from that air into the animal and then from the water It just diffuses into the air packet and this is known in other animals. It's called plastron Plastron respiration so amylopigets can breathe underwater and the coolest thing is that had I discovered this You know maybe 20 years ago I could have discovered Gore-Tex because this is exactly what Gore-Tex is fashioned after so you hear it all the time Waterproof yet breathable and it turns out the Gore-Tex actually is fat fashioned after arthropod plastrons So I want to tell that story just to say that sometimes basic research Curiosity discovery about the natural world can lead you in directions that you never ever ever could have imagined That can be very translational Okay, so as I was doing these experiments I became more and more fascinated with these animals especially with these long legs and so when you look at just the very tip of these legs under a scanning Electron microscope what you see is that they're covered with hairs So they have big hairs at the tip that are called bristles and these hairs can feel as well as taste They have these little club shaped sencilla which similarly can taste and then they have these hairs That have holes all along the entire shaft and just based on the way these hairs look It was hypothesized that these animals can smell that these are actually airborne olfactory detectors So my first electrophysiology experiments actually demonstrated that indeed Amplipid's can smell they can smell a range of compounds and their sense of smell is Comparable to that of some of the best smelling insects that we know The insects that are the best smellers not the best smelling insects And so when you look at the kind of neural substrate for this Ability to smell what you see here in purple is this is all what we call olfactory glomeruli So these are brain regions that are dedicated to processing All factory information or smell this green area here These are mushroom body calices and the mushroom body of arthropods is a higher order brain processing region That an insect is thought to be involved in learning and memory in arachnids. We actually don't know its function So right now I have an NSF grant with some collaborators at Bowling Green State University Vern Bingman and Dan Wegman as well as Wolfie Gronenberg at the University of Arizona Where we're trying to understand how this complex brain Underlies potentially complex behavior, and I'll tell you a little bit more about that But I really want to drive home the insanity of this Amplipid brain So this is a 3d reconstruction done by a postdoc that's on our grant and what you're going to see is enormous mushroom bodies so this All this area here and kind of light purple and darker purple You can see how convoluted it is and just packed in these are the lobes of the mushroom bodies And then this green here are the calices So you might not be able to fully appreciate what this means without comparing it to something else but keep in mind this kind of convoluted massive structure and When we look at an Amplipid brain versus say a jumping spider brain And we look at how much of that brain is composed of mushroom body What you find is that the mushroom bodies of Amplipid's make up 40% of their brain whereas in jumping spiders they make up 9% and Again, this is a part of the brain that is hypothesized in insects to be involved in learning and memory Relative to their body size Amplipid's have the largest mushroom body of any arthropod So they should be brilliant right and everyone should be studying them So we're really interested in This both the kind of fact that they can smell and this neural processing for smell But what does that mean in terms of their daily life like how are they using smell or are they using smell? What's the function of this very seemingly elaborate brain region? So in order to really figure out what they're doing you need to go to the field and observe them and again Amplipid's are not very well studied. They Some might say are scary looking And they're completely nocturnal and I think that combination of things has made it such that they're not a group of animals That have received much research attention But I went into the field and decided I was going to figure out what Amplipid's do in their daily lives Which is really nighttime So I did a massive mercury capture study over a three month period down in Costa Rica Where I had three different 50 by 25 meter plots in the rainforest So I want you all to just take a moment and think about 50 by 25 meters It may not seem that big but then think about it in a dense tropical understory Off-trail and then think about the fact that you're going out to those 25 by 50 meter plots at night To survey them so every tree within these plots that was bigger than a certain size I would survey every three to four nights every Amplipid I find found I would collect I would give it an individual mark measure it sex it put it back and then I would keep monitoring collecting new individuals and marking them and Recording when I re-saw individuals So it was during one of these Evenings when typically I could find people to go out with me So I worked at a research station the salvo biological station that brought a lot of courses through and Visiting scientists and often people wanted to go out at night But they were a little hesitant to do so and so I would say well come along with me I do it all the time and I could kind of get free field assistants So I often had people going out with me but this particular night there someone had gone into San Jose and brought back a keg And so there was a big party at the field station. So of course nobody wanted to join me in the field So I was out by myself and imagine walking along and you have your flashlight shining on the ground You're constantly looking for things and sure enough. I saw a fair-to-lance Tercio payload is another name for it. It's a very venomous snake in Costa Rica It's very common at this field station and they're notorious for being aggressive So the snake is maybe kind of where that black box is and I'm here and I'm watching it and the tree I need to survey is over here and I'm making this kind of Decision of okay if I go around this way I can probably survey my tree But I'm going to lose sight of the snake and that makes me a little nervous and as I'm Kind of deciding what to do the snake is suddenly flying through the air a foot off the ground mouth open towards me So I jump backwards farther than I've ever jumped in my life I'm sure and took a couple steps and turned around and ran and so that's just To to fit in with our new Slogan at UNL. I also got stung by a bullet ants and I can attest to the fact that there's a reason that they call it bullet ants Okay, but I did find some really valuable information I found that amblypigets have high sight fidelity meaning that you can find them in the same place night after night They can also though when they leave their trees they can travel pretty far they can travel more than 30 meters They often return to their same tree and they seem to be territorial So this got me thinking about how are they actually finding their way through this dense Understory when I had a hard time finding my plots and I had flagging tape all along the way So how on earth are they able to to revisit these trees when they leave them? so I taught I Designed and taught two different organization for tropical study courses in 2014 and 2017 called the ecology and evolution of arachnids at the same field station and Through the course I was able to recruit a bunch of students Some of whom are in the room right now To help me with this project so with a lot of students We were able to go into the field and do kind of a massive study where we would collect individuals And I just want to say sometimes I don't know if you can tell this is someone on another student's shoulders To get the animals that were really high up in the trees But we would collect them give them an individual mark with paint and then we would manipulate them such that they either Could not smell or could not see because we were interested in the potential role of smell in navigation And it turns out that they can navigate using smell So when we deprive them of the ability to smell they were less likely to make it back to their tree We also put these nifty little neural transfer radio transmitters on them with some funding from the National Geographic Society and were able to monitor their movements and show that they didn't be lined back But they would actually go to different trees along the way Suggesting potentially that they have kind of a larger representation of the area over which they're walking So again with this NSF funding right now We're coupling this field work with really controlled laboratory studies where we're manipulating the cues that they can receive Looking at how they behave and then the idea is that we're going to link that with brain function Okay, so Ambulapigeds also have some really interesting behaviors when they interact this top left video here is two animals that are in a sparring contest So they're fighting with each other This is real time You can see on the side angle. They kind of lift up and lower down So they face off in this asymmetrical stance if they're really evenly mashed so they can often kind of Settle the dispute with just this ritualized display But if they're really evenly matched in size they sometimes will battle and this is where they will physically come together and engage each other And the reason these are kind of this greenish color is this is with an infrared camera because again They're nocturnal so this is taken in complete darkness So you can see they kind of try and push push each other over So we were really interested in what's going on during this display How are they actually communicating and how are they determining who is winning the outcome? So this is research that was done in collaboration with Roger Santor who was a postdoc in my lab a while ago now And from his research as well as some with Casey Fowler Finn We saw that 74% of these contests were Settled with just this antenna form leg vibration, which you saw during the sparring they sometimes engage in physical contact in the battle But most of the time it's this antenna form leg vibration And what we were able to find is that it's whoever does it for longer Wins, but how are they detecting it? So using high-speed videography? We were able to show that they're actually not touching each other So they're waving these legs at their opponents, but they're not coming into contact Again, these are done in complete darkness. So they're not using vision either When you look at where they're positioning these legs What you find is that they are positioning their legs Right over the patella of their opponent So we kind of noticed this and then took the animals to the scope and looked at the patella and sure enough There are two sensory hairs on the patella and these hairs are really long and really thin And we know that these are the types of hairs that can actually detect air particle movement So we hypothesize maybe they're actually using air particle movement during these contests Which is not a modality that is commonly attributed to communication in animals So we tested this by taking live animals Restraining them we got a wire that was the same diameter and length of an antenna form leg We hooked it up to a motor so that it would move at the same frequency as an antenna form leg Right above this restrained animal We put an electrode in and we recorded electrical responses and sure enough Every time the stimulus goes over the leg you get a firing of an action potential so these hairs are capable of detecting air particle displacement and They seem to be using air particle displacement during contests And this was actually the first time that these types of hairs were shown to be used in communication We actually think it's a lot more common across arthropods It's a modality that we're not very familiar with and so we think it's been overlooked But we actually have evidence in our lab that there are a lot of wolf spiders that may also use air particle displacement to communicate Okay, so and blue pigeons can breathe underwater They can smell they can find their way home and they do this using smell and they can communicate using air particle displacement And there are lots of other studies that I didn't tell you about but they can learn Tactile cues they can actually learn to discriminate two different grains of sandpaper. I'm not even sure I could do that And they can learn chemical cues. I Won't take it personally And so this is kind of where the glory comes from all of the grit that you put into especially field work So I'm just going to really briefly tell you about my wolf on my work on wolf spiders Because there's far too much of it to get into here and it gets rather dense quickly But a lot of my research in my lab studies the evolution of communication in wolf spiders So these are spiders that are about the size of a nickel you probably have them in your backyard here And each of these is a different species and you can see that these are all males You might not be able to see that but I'll tell you they're all males But what you can see is that they all differ in the degree of ornamentation they have on their four legs So there are some species here that don't have anything there are some that have just black pigment on Portions of their legs and then there are some down here that have these big brushes in addition to pigmentation So there's a lot of variation in the way males look and it turns out there's also a lot of variation in the way that males Try to entice females to mate with them. So not only do they have dynamic movements, but they also produce song so it may not be quite as elegant as some bird song, but it's still pretty impressive so these animals have Visual displays they have morphological traits. They have dynamic movements, and they also produce vibrations and it varies across species So there are some species with these brushes Who do lots of waving? They also produce this sub straight-born vibration This one is its closest relative. That's all it does There's no ornamentation. There's no leg waving. They just slam their body on the ground and Then there are others here That are maybe kind of an intermediate between the two So we're trying to understand what drives this diversity. What's the role of female preferences? What's the role of the mating environment that they're found in? And this is work that my postdoc Ron McGinley is kind of leading off of an NSF grant that we have right now Okay, but what I really want to talk to you about and and what Chancellor Green alluded to earlier is some of the crazy Mating systems that spiders have and I want to focus on this because both of these systems are right here in Nebraska So I have been talking about work in Costa Rica Work our wolf spider work takes us all over North America But both of these stories are right here in Lincoln, Nebraska So what I need to tell you first is a little bit. I need to give you a little tutorial about how spiders transfer sperm Something you may never have thought about before but so these spiders have these modified appendages that I told you about Upfront they're called pedipalps when a male matures they develop this big bulb like kind of teardrop structure and They're producing their sperm in their abdomen in the second body part here But what they do is they'll build a modified web it's called a sperm web and they ejaculate sperm onto the sperm web and then they turn around and they pick it up in these Pedipalps so they're carrying sperm around in these pedipalps and this is actually the organ that they're using to transfer sperm And that's going to be important So these are the pedipalps. This is where they're holding and this is the organ. They're using to transfer sperm Okay, so the first story I want to tell you is about spontaneous death in the dark fishing spider And this is work done by a previous PhD student Steve Schwartz Where he was looking for a local system and found that you could find these spiders all Over Lincoln if you go to Wilderness Park if you go in any creek bed and look on the banks And there are big roots kind of sticking out if you go at night You will see these spiders and again the females can be quite large So they're relatively common the species is Dolomites tenobrosis and what Steve found was that them these males die When they mate with a female So this is a male on top of a female going back and forth and back and forth and right there I don't know if you saw it his legs curl up. We're going to do it in slow motion again So here he's going back and forth with these pedipalps and look for his legs curling Right there as soon as he engages with the female his legs curl up So Steve thought this is crazy. I just want to make sure this is really happening He went out and collected lots and lots of spiders and it turns out all males die all the time so over 200 Males were used in this they transferred their genetic material though, so But they all died and it's not just a Nebraska thing. So we also made sure That this was happening in other parts of the country and indeed this species everywhere We've collected it as soon as a male transfers sperm He curls up and his heart eventually stops beating now. Keep in mind. They have two pedipalps These males still have sperm in the other pedipalp, but they're not using it They're dying as soon as they insert their first pedipalp and the curious thing about this is that do you see this big sack right here? So the way males transfer sperm is they have a sack that the sperm is carried in inside their pedipalp And when they go to transfer they push Hemolymph they push fluid in their body into the PELP it expands the sack and pushes the sperm out Most of the time this sack expands and it goes right back in and then they can use the PELP again So this is what the PELP looks like this is a micro CT scan and this green is that Hematodocle sack that is not inflated and you can see the little duct here where the sperm actually comes out So again, most of the time spiders inflate the sack and then it deflates and then they may use their other PELP and it inflates and deflates But in these oh, and this is a high-speed video of what that actually looks like So this is the sack inflating it eventually bursts, but that's about the extent it would be normally So here we we just wanted to see this so we actually dissected a PELP a fixed it to a syringe with water And inflated it manually under a high-speed camera Okay, so you can see the sack right here You can see that white inflated sack the male sack inflates any hangs So there must be some locking mechanism that keeps that sack inflated So other things to note is that females always eat the males So they hang from the females body But eventually she plucks him off hundred percent of the time and eats him Now males are smaller than females. They're about 14 times less in mass than females So how much are females getting from eating these males? So we did a study where we had females that were given a male to eat They were given nothing to eat or they were given a cricket to eat and it turns out when they eat a male They produce more offspring. So this is offspring number cannibalism nothing cricket They produce heavier offspring. So they're offspring way more and Their offspring are more likely to survive for longer So there are clearly benefits to females and males of eating these males But we don't really know why so right now. There are lots of questions What's the locking mechanism? How and why are males dying? How is the consumption of the male influencing offspring size and number? We have lots of research going on to address these But if any of you are interested or have ideas Contact me because there are so many directions that we could go and these are systems These are questions where I think actually expertise from different areas not even of science But even engineering fluid mechanics Could be really useful to try to really understand what's going on in the system from the mechanistic point of view From the comparative point of view. I have two undergrads that have been working on Dolomites tenobrosis as well as Dolomites scriptus. So Bridget Bickner is Graduating in December Dan Schoenberg just graduated But they have both been looking at sperm numbers and the role of hydraulics in sperm transfer in both of these species So this is the species where males die This is another local species where males don't die But what Dan found is that when a male mounts a female he inserts once and then he jumps off and He often gets eaten and it's really rare for a male to actually get two Different insertions to be able to use both of his petapults in this other species So what they've found so far again, this is the self-sacrificing species These are data. This is from our lab and the others are from previously published work If we look at the proportion of sperm that's transferred during a mating We see that tenobrosis is right in the mix with everybody else nothing Particularly spectacular about that, but when we look at how many sperm are transferred 782,000 sperm in one single insertion If we compare that to these species who are getting multiple insertions It still is nowhere near so we look at this close relative even with two insertions Tenobrosis is getting 16 times more sperm transferred So we're in the process of doing some experiments where we're trying to manipulate the hydrostatic pressure and Look at the role of that in sperm transfer. So this is all very much ongoing work, but a fascinating system Okay, so I'm going to tell you about another system the nursery web spiders and This this is work done by Alyssa Anderson who is my most recent PhD student these spiders are also found in Lincoln, Nebraska And these spiders do a very different thing. So instead of dying Facilitating their own death these males actually tie females up when they mate with them So this is a male here laying silk down on top of a female. You can see she kind of pulls her legs in What this looks like in the end is you can see silk strands on the female you can really clearly see them Hopefully here as the female pulls her legs in So males when the female is tied up they insert this is that hematodontal sac expansion Showing that males are transferring sperm. They do it twice when they can wrap a female but when you plug the Spinnerettes with dental resin which Alyssa did so that males can no longer produce silk and they can't wrap females What happens is that males that can't wrap only get one insertion and They are more likely to get cannibalized When we look at this one insertion She did a series of experiments to show that if you get two insertions you get more sperm transferred And you get higher fertilization success So these males avoid death by wrapping females with silk They transfer more sperm by wrapping females with silk and they benefit by surviving the mate again And these are data I didn't show you but she actually went out and looked at movement patterns and density and demographics of these spiders and In collaboration with Colton lots who is a current PhD student They developed a model showing that it's likely for males to encounter multiple females and females and males will mate multiply So here we have two very different systems where in one males sacrifice themselves They get more offspring heavier offspring and offspring that survive longer in the other males tie females up with silk They avoid cannibalism they transfer more sperm and they live on to mate with more females So I hope that this convinces you that spiders are a great system to study the evolution of mating systems Because in closely related species you get not only bizarre Mating systems, but very divergent and so understanding processes that are driving divergence in mating systems I think spiders are one of the best systems that you can work with Okay, so I want to move on to engagement now and talk just a little bit About the eight-legged encounters program that I put together and as Chancellor Green mentioned this was funded by NSF It started as a Sunday with the scientist at Morrill Hall And it involves leveraging art and science art and Arachnids for informal science learning and I want to say that Paul Tisdale is my partner in all of this He is a local artist and I really wanted to incorporate art into everything that I did here So all of the graphics all of the images all of the artwork that you see out on the table that is all Paul's doing So we made more at this point more than 40 hands-on modules that cover topics from classification and taxonomy spiders and silk the path of predators actually walks you through the 11 living arachnid orders and you learn about each and Then there's lots of hands-on science one of which was we actually let the participants engage in a in an experiment that they collected data for So I recently was able to pull all of this together in a publication that included evaluation It's one of my publication. I'm kind of most proud of because it was so far out of my wheelhouse But it's a great resource for anyone interested in any of these activities and instead of walking you through all of them I wanted to show just a couple images But I also wanted to actually show you what one looks like so we are going to have a little audience participation And if willing I'm going to ask Chancellor Green And and Bob Wilhelm to come up on stage and I'll need two other volunteers, but before actually wait before you do This the audience gets to decide what we're going to do So there are three different options We can forage like a bowl of spider or they can They can engage in an amyloid pigeon contest or they can be trapped or spiders trying to find prey So look at those and I'm going to do a ray a hand raise. How many want a? How many want B? Okay, B it is Okay, can I have two other volunteers too, please? I'll pick you if not. All right, Elijah and Miranda perfect Okay, so if you guys could come on stage Basically, you are going to re-enact the amyloid pigeon battles and so remember we talked about those sensory hairs These are your sensory hairs and these are your opponents. We're going to move the opponents away from each other a little bit So we'll have one opponent here one here. These are your antenna form legs so you get one and You get one and the rules of the game are that and I'll tell you guys what you're going to do in a minute The way these animals move is that they actually the movement is all in the shoulder So you can't flick your wrist So you need to kind of move your shoulder and the goal is to wave over this hair as many times as you can in 10 seconds Now you are each going to have a counter Where you guys are going to whoops, let me set this you guys are going to count how many times? But the additional trick is that I told you these animals couldn't see very well Yeah, well, so we'll have you guys come here and stand in front and You guys can stand on this side to observe and I will give you the option You can either put blindfolds on or you could just close your eyes That's what I figured Okay, so line yourself up and I will tell you when to go ready Go all right, what are we at? Oh, he's not supposed to hit it. He's supposed to go over top Okay 14 all right Thank you guys Thank you for being good sports So That's just one of many activities That's kind of the type of thing that we do There are a lot of other activities that are actually out on a table there There's one you can be a palpigrade and try and get through a maze with your eyes closed And there's a lot of the trading cards that are available to take home to your kids or for yourselves So when you leave, please, please grab some Okay, so we took this event to the butterfly pavilion outside of Denver to the Denver Museum of Natural History to Morrill Hall twice to the Toledo Zoo and We were even invited by NSF to bring modules to the USA science and engineering festival Which required us to develop new materials and I just again want to give a shout out to Paul So for the rest of the places we use three by five foam boards that he created for each arachnid order For this we couldn't travel to DC with three by five foam boards So he actually painted hand painted six by eight foot canvases of Four of these arachnid orders and they are works of art and we could just roll them up and put them in ski bags to take with us Okay, so we actually did some evaluation on this and we were able to show that art was successful at engaging the public Volunteers were successful at each of these stations We had someone running it who had been trained with the material Participants increased their interest in science and they increased their interest in spiders Interestingly, we had a question about how much more or less likely they were to kill a spider in their house It turns out only 40% of people were more were less likely to kill a spider in their house But I like to think that they the people who came to this already liked spiders and it was just a poorly worded question Um, so in terms of adventure when we're on our dreams list here I this my research has taken me to caves in Puerto Rico Costa Rica where you know, I came in close contact with a boa constrictor that was hanging at a cave entrance trying to catch bats as they were Exiting for the beginning of the night I've gone to Costa Rica and Panama sometimes with little ones in tow and then worked in Brazil, California Florida and Nebraska, Mississippi, etc Memories I have had so many fantastic people through my lab I have met so many amazing friends and colleagues from UNL from across the country from across the world We've had fantastic pumpkin carving parties throughout the years and just lots of great people and along with all these great people has been tremendous Success so in addition to my own successes with lots of papers that my students were also part of and lots of grants and things Like that all of my students have gone on to wonderful places So I've graduated seven PhD students one master student He's the one who's a now a science teacher at North Star and Five postdocs who have all gone on to great institutions So I hope that I've convinced you that arachnids can inspire dreams And that nature provides untapped opportunities for discovery And I just want to make a plug that I told you about my research But spiders produce silk that has all kinds of properties and venom scorpions have venom and just the biomedical and biomaterial potential of these animals is astounding and again if anyone is interested I think a lot of Progress progress has been hindered in those realms because of a lack of information about the natural organismal biology of these animals So there are lots of people I would like to thank I thank you all for being here, and I'm happy to take questions Good afternoon. I am dr. Jamie Reimer, and it is my pleasure to serve as chair of the research council Thank you so much dr. Hebbits for a very engaging and informative presentation And we have some moderators that are walking around the room with portable microphones And we'll be happy to take any questions that you might have for dr. Hebbits at this point Your minds are blown. Yeah, Daniel So do you have any thoughts or ideas of why their brain looks like our intestines? Well, so I think that you know It's kind of like the mammalian brain that is so convoluted that you know there's clearly something about getting a lot of of Material into a small space and so I think a lot of those lobes is just the need for a lot of Processing just jammed into a small space and so I think that that you know That's what we're going off of and why we think that clearly there's something Some special selective pressure that's acting on this part of the brain. That's really important for these animals So there's the two lobes Connect up to the calices and they kind of intertwine around each other And one of the reasons that isn't published yet is because this postdoc has had a really hard time actually mapping This because they're so convoluted and kind of intertwined in different areas Yeah Well, I have two different kinds of questions one is when you were starting What caused you to be to sort of choose to to focus on spiders versus a Scorpions and then the other one that I have is the example the one type of experiments you were showing with the two closely you said closely related species that had very different mating patterns You have anything to say about like what you know, how long it might have taken for that the evolution to you know To separate those two out, right great question. So your first question Is is complete serendipity? So I was an undergrad and an institution in the honors program needed to do an honors thesis and There was an arachnologist there who studied wolf spiders And she had just taught an invert zoe course that I took that I loved And so I approached her and asked her if she would be my mentor for my honors thesis and her answer was Yes, if you work on spiders and I said that's I have no idea what I want to work on so that sounds good to me and once I started working with them I You know, it was one of those moments as an undergraduate where you realize how Little is actually known kind of up to that point in my life. I thought we knew most everything And so at that point I realized the potential for discovery and have just taken off But I'm not opposed to working with scorpions. I mean, I think all of the arachnid groups I am fascinated by so so the second question those two the mating systems of those two fishing spiders Unfortunately, we know so little so there are nine species in the genus that are in North America One other species is thought to be highly dimorphic Just like the one where there's spontaneous male death Sexual size dimorphism is a trait that tends to be correlated over evolutionary time with these terminal investment strategies by males at least in spiders And so my dream is my next big grant is actually going to be a comparative study Trying to get the basic natural history information from these other systems But one of the things that I think is driving it is Female aggression and I think that in some species it may get to a point where females are so aggressive And you're likely to not make it to the second mating anyway And so maybe if you then can invest in sperm transfer And not future matings that may be kind of a successful evolutionary trajectory But we don't know the evolutionary relationships of these species yet And we don't know how long ago they diverged, but it's definitely a direction that I hope to go Have you counted the sperm in the packet that's not delivered? Yeah, so the way that we calculate how Much the proportion of sperm is transferred is we first do the preliminary analysis where we take males that don't mate And we count sperm in both palps and we make sure that they're tightly correlated and they are it's like point nine You know our our squared value So once we have that information we work under the assumption that when a male does mate the amount that is in his Unused palp is the same amount or a similar amount to what was in his used palp And so we actually use that difference to to estimate the amount of sperm transferred Good question. I didn't explain that at all right So in in Steve's work, he was he's he's a very meticulous rigorous kind of OCD type Scientist, so he was incredibly kind of immaculate and careful about his raising Environments and some of his spiders had up to 800 spiderlings We have not been able to replicate that and with that same species since he's left the lab for whatever reason But a lot of babies. I mean obviously nowhere near the 782,000 but still 800 offspring is a lot Yeah, right so Could we have you repeat your question into a microphone for our web stream audience can also hear. Thank you Sorry, so the question was That We're kind of looking at hypotheses of olfaction and is there evidence of using olfaction of the production of pheromones or Using olfactory cues in other aspects of their life So we don't know of any production of olfactory or chemical cues part of my early work. I actually Sat and mapped trees made a grid on trees in the tropics of where animal I knew animals were and sat for nine hours a night and mapped their movements as they came out of their crevices and went back in To look for some kind of trailing or something like that There was no evidence that I found that they are producing anything at least on the substrate When animals are in the field and they are disturbed some species will do this kind of Raising and lowering behavior that could be it's it's similar to kind of pheromone production and release in insects You can't smell anything and we have not done headspace analysis of that yet So it doesn't look like they're marking anything in terms of an olfactory space that they are creating In terms of foraging we have some well There's some evidence that they that they might use olfaction In foraging, but it certainly doesn't seem to be a dominant modality I get the male self-sacrifice to get those genes in the next generation But what's in it for the female to let herself be tied up? Yeah, that's a great question And so the interesting thing with that system is initially when males approach the females they As you saw they kind of pull their legs in and they're very passive and they do very much Let the males tie them up. They're never fighting as soon as the male gets his first Insertion she starts trying to break out of that silk and so it's at that point that the silk seems to be important So we're actually we've done some work collecting hemolymph at various stages looking at potential hormone changes where Females are becoming more aggressive at kind of, you know, very discreet points in the process But as to why they're doing why they why they're complicit in the first place You know, it could be that females are just wanting to get some sperm and then once they have some then maybe they can be choosier and We don't know anything about sperm priority patterns in this species But we're actually collaborating with Kristi Montuth and some students in her lab to do paternity analysis to see If a male is a second male or a third male that mates with a female How much of those offspring does he get to fertilize and how much of it might be? Dictated by the order of the male versus maybe the female can control some of that So if there's female control then it may just be a bet hedging strategy for females to say I'm going to get some sperm because I know later I can kind of manipulate it and decide who's to use But it's far too early in the system now to kind of figure that out But it is true that after the females get the first insertion That's when they start fighting and trying to get the males off Did that kind of answer your question So you mentioned that when the female eats a species of its own Kind of kind the male is of the same species Right fact on the progeny is much higher than if the female it's a cricket or a cookie or something like this, right? So what's your hypothesis? What could? You know this male from the same species bring on to the right, you know It's it's tempting to come up with all sorts of interesting hypotheses But I think I'm hesitant to do that yet because there's kind of a fundamental flaw In that design in the experiment that we did which we didn't realize at the time But all of these spiders are being fed crickets in the lab and so then Under this experiment, they're either fed a male or a cricket Which is the same food. They've been fed or nothing and it Kind of the most the simplest explanation is that a heterogeneous diet is helpful And it has nothing to do with the fact that it's a conspecific male It's just something different than what they've been eating and I think before I go too far thinking about potential hypotheses of What could be in the male or maybe there are genes that are turned on or something like that? I think we really want to confirm that it is indeed the male and not just a diverse diet So there's actually an undergrad in my lab right now who's planning on writing his u-care project To explore that further just at the feeding level so feeding them a conspecific female feeding them You know a male that's that died in some other way Because maybe there's something about the way that the male died that might be Yeah, changing something but I think at this point there's some more basic information I want before I Go too far out on a limb with hypotheses, but with that said I'm happy to hear other people's ideas So you've invested an enormous amount of time and money in public outreach and done some really amazing things And I think probably many of us should be doing a lot more public outreach as as scientists But maybe we don't have as much time and money as you've had to invest in this How how how do we make public outreach a more common part of faculty's Job and expectations and just um ability to to work on that It's a great question And I think the way that I started before I got the money Is is a good approach at least it worked well for me and and that approach was to actually incorporate it into my classes so I Taught an arachnology class and as the final exam instead of A final exam. It was an upper level class. I would have the students work together To develop a hands-on interactive learning module using arachnids to teach some evolutionary concept And I partnered with local high schools And they would actually go into the high schools And take an hour of time and present their materials in these local high schools And so I think that if you can incorporate it in creative ways into your teaching It's a way that you're kind of you know killing two birds with one stone And then you start to develop it was actually because of that that I learned about this funding opportunity at nsf Because someone from nsf said hey, that's the type of thing we fund Have you heard about this opportunity and I hadn't And so as soon as you start building up A history and and demonstration of success Then more doors start to open and it becomes a lot easier But I would say doing it in a strategic way that doesn't require more time But are automatically Builds into what you have to do anyway is the best way to start Where should you start if you want to learn about arachnids? Oh, there are so many places Um coming to this presentation is an excellent first start I think that depending on what type of arachnid there are different resources available There is an excellent book called arachnids by um beccalone is the name and it's written for Kind of a general audience And it's a really good overview of the different arachnid orders and some of it may be Using a lot of words that may kind of not be overly familiar But there are certainly parts of it that are quite accessible And so that's a book if you're just wanting to learn about kind of the natural history and behavior I think that that's a fantastic place to start Um, but in addition, you know, my lab has a slew of graduate and undergraduate students and postdocs Who love nothing more than to talk about arachnids? Um, and so I think that don't be shy to look if you live in Lincoln, you know, look on the web find some Email addresses and see if you can come visit the lab and meet with some folks We have time for one more question if there are any Seeing none. I think that was a very fitting conclusion to the q&a So if you would please help me welcome vice chancellor Wilhelm back to the stage great, so I want to thank uh Dr. Raymer first of all and and also the research council for both bringing such an accomplished and interesting speaker and also honoring such an accomplished and interesting speaker for the Nebraska lecture And uh, dr. Hebbits. I'm going to have to ask you to come back one more time Of course, it's our custom It's only a small token, but we have a small recognition for you and This is all sealed up, but I can tell you it's no secret. It's a it's a framed Copy of the of what we used to the poster we used to to publicize this Of course, there's been a I think a lot of buzz About the this this lecture we heard all through Lincoln about it So I hope that you'll take this and uh and think well of us and the Nebraska lecture. So thank you very much again For being our lecturer this year