They are black, two millimetres to one centimetre in length, take part in sexual cannibalism, and are the subject of study for Professor Maydianne Andrade, associate professor at U of T Scarborough and Canada Research Chair in Integrative Behavioural Ecology. Professor Andrade researches across different habitats to understand the relationship between environment and gene expression in the mating behaviours of spiders, including among them the Australian redback.
The Varsity sat down with Professor Andrade to talk about her research and career.
The Varsity: How did you become interested in research?
Professor Andrade: Just like the 99 per cent of students [who do well] in biology, I thought I would go to medical school. I wanted to be a pediatrician. My plans changed when I took my first year biology course as an undergraduate. The professor teaching the course used to take a bit of time during the lecture to talk about active research that was going on in the field and how it related to the course content. It was about two weeks into the class when I began my inquiry and asked him what he and the people he talked about did. My first year biology professor opened my eyes to something I had not thought of before. It was being turned on to this other option and being excited about the idea of creating the knowledge contained in textbooks that triggered my interest in research. From there I discovered this unusual interest in mating within insects and spiders.
TV: Why did you choose spiders as the subject of your research?
PA: In the beginning I was interested in the theory of male investments in mating and pairing. In fact, if you look across the animal kingdom, male investment in mating is actually relatively rare in anything other than just copulating and leaving. I was interested in figuring out what changed things so that the male could invest in a particular mating, either through giving things to the female or staying around and helping with their offspring. Initially, I was interested in figuring out the most extreme form of investment imaginable, and that involves a male letting the female eat him instead of something that they bring. In my initial research I worked on insects, but when I read a paper on these Australian spiders, I figured that they were the best I could possibly work on.
TV: Can you tell us about your past and current research?
PA: My initial work involved trying to understand why male Australian redback spiders allow the females to eat them. It’s a self-sacrifice behaviour where males dangle their bodies while the females copulate. Not every organism can physically do this, [but] spiders can because of the way they are built.
Evolution is all about survival. The traits that let the animal survive are those that combine survival and reproduction [to] maximize the individual’s reproductive success over his or her lifetime. The lifetime of a male redback spider is restricted to single mating. So if you look in terms of benefits and costs in reproductive success, a male that allows himself to be killed isn’t losing that much [for] his species. It’s very challenging to find females in the first place, about 85 per cent of males die without every finding a female, [and] once you get there, chances of finding another female are very slim. Females let males mate longer if they [allow the female to] cannibalize them. We don’t know the mechanism yet, but they benefit because they end up fertilizing more eggs.
During my masters and PhD, I studied their cost and benefit relationship as well as the other kind of traits that males in this kind of situation might develop over evolutionary time.
There are two different directions in terms of my research. [Firstly], I am interested in sexual selection for male traits and how female reproductive interest or evolutionary interests shape that. I am also interested in the development of those tradeoffs during the juvenile stage, and what kind of information they integrate to build the success you need in the environment.
TV: What motivates you to do further research?
PA: Everything we do opens up all kinds of new questions. Sometimes I think people become scientists because they’re kind of anal-retentive control freaks: the more we don’t understand the more we try to push forward to find answers to the unanswered questions.
The other aspect is the excitement of my graduate students and undergraduate students. One of the great things about this position is that I get to work with students in my lab. At the moment, I have four graduate and about nine undergraduate students in the lab, and they’re always thinking from a different angle, suggesting new things that we haven’t thought of, so I have all these questions and ideas creating the underlying push forward. The more I do, the more questions I have and it’s always the theory that drives me.
TV: What is the significance of your research outside the lab?
PA: Essentially my work has no basic application. There is always this debate of basic vs. applied research. There are a couple ways of thinking about research with an applied angle.
My contribution comes in terms of the people I train and teach, teaching them how to apply the basic methods and to think creatively about solutions to problems. Students that come out of my lab […] have gone in all sorts of different directions, even where the questions dealt with in my lab aren’t applied, but the methodology and logic used to answer the question is built.
A lot of insight into areas that initially weren’t the common subject of interest actually comes from basic research that [at first] seems unrelated. For example, a lot of our molecular methodologies, statistics for using DNA fingerprinting techniques, came from researchers who were doing something kind of similar to me and were identifying the paternity of offspring to figure out who daddy and mommy were, and you know how widespread that is now. So you can’t really anticipate when something that you do is going to have these kinds of applications.
TV: You have received extensive media attention for your research, what does this kind of recognition mean to you?
PA: It helps with public education, to correct misconceptions about how evolution works. It challenges how we educate children and university students in biology. When the media takes up your research and translates it to public consumption, I think what’s really important for me is that they get the science right at some level.
TV: What advice would you give to students aspiring to follow a similar path as the one you have taken?
PA: The biggest advice is that you can do it. A lot of people feel that it takes a long time. They feel that they will have to delay their whole life before they’re done. I got married while I was in grad school and I have two young children. Don’t be afraid of the time commitment and just realize that you can do it.
