Abstract
Urbanisation, one of the main driving forces of the decline in arthropod diversity, is a global environmental problem. Urbanisation causes changes to the size, connectivity, structure, and environmental parameters of their natural habitat. Due to a host of novel conditions and situations, high exploratory and risk-taking behaviours are beneficial traits to cope with urban environments. Therefore, we hypothesised that urban spiders should display more exploratory and risk-taking behaviour than their rural conspecifics. We tested 253 individuals of a widespread, forest-associated ground-dwelling wolf spider species, Pardosa alacris, sampled from rural and urban forest sites during their peak activity period, for their locomotory activity, exploratory and risk-taking behaviour by six frequently used behavioural measures. Combining the studied behavioural measures into composite scores using redundancy analysis, we identified two composite variables, the activity-exploration-boldness and the risk-taking behavioural ones. Behaviour measured by the composite activity-exploration-boldness score was significantly repeatable, but not the composite risk-taking behavioural one. There were no urbanisation-related differences in the composite behavioural scores, suggesting that higher exploratory or risk-taking behaviour may not yield fitness benefits in this generalist predator. We found, however, significant sex-specific differences in the composite activity-exploration-boldness behavioural scores. The higher activity, exploratory and boldness in males than females may be explained by their different life-history strategies and sex-specific selective pressures.
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Data availability
Data used for analyses are available in the Mendeley repository (doi: 10.17632/j6x8hyxgj9.2; https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/j6x8hyxgj9/2).
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Acknowledgements
We thank Réka Csicsek and Dávid D. Nagy for your help during the study, as well as the Department of Green Infrastructure of the Mayor’s Office of Debrecen, especially Orsolya Hamecz, for the permission to conduct the study. This research was funded by the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Fund (grant number OTKA K-146628). Authorship is by the “first-and-last-author-emphasis” (FLAE) principle.
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T.M.: conceptualisation, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, supervision, project administration, resources, validation, visualisation, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing. R.H.: conceptualisation, investigation, methodology, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing. S.M.: investigation, methodology, writing—review and editing. M.T.: investigation, methodology, writing—review and editing. S.F.K.: methodology, visualisation, writing—review and editing. G.L.L.: conceptualisation, methodology, supervision, validation, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing.
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Magura, T., Horváth, R., Mizser, S. et al. Sex-specific but not urbanisation-related behavioural differences in a wolf spider, Pardosa alacris. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-41239-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-41239-2
