Spiders form an order of almost 50,000 known species found in virtually all land habitats throughout the world. With only one known exception, all of these thousands of species are known or supposed to be predatory, mostly preying on animals of about their own body size. We would therefore expect spiders to live solitary existences, and most, in fact, do. However, a minority of species have adopted the peculiar habit of living in groups for all or a substantial part of their life cycle [5, 18, 20]. Species termed colonial typically aggregate individually built orb webs within a common scaffolding of support lines, whereas social and subsocial spiders share a single, largely irregular, web (Fig. 1). The orb web characteristic of most colonial species should provide limited opportunities for cooperative interactions, as orb webs must be built and utilized individually. The irregular webs of subsocial and social species, on the other hand, can be built and utilized by several individuals...
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Avilés, L. (2021). Social Spiders. In: Starr, C.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Social Insects. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28102-1_110
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