search articles:     from the issue of August 21, 2008           CAREER grant fuels Hebets Web-based study  BY SARA GILLIAM, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS Oh, the way he drums his feet.     ARACHNID STUDY - Eileen Hebets, assistant professor of biological sciences, poses with a spider. Her research project, funded through a CAREER grant, examines spider communication. Photos by Greg Nathan, University Communications. That sultry pheromone she emits. Her flirty courtship rituals, his seductive signaling. Spiders do more than lurk in your basement. They're communicating in complex and nuanced ways, and their behavior can teach us a great deal about the evolution of communication. Eileen Hebets, assistant professor of biological sciences has received a Faculty Early CAREER Development grant for her research on arachnid communication. The five-year National Science Foundation grants are awarded to young academics to support career-defining research. The funding allowed Hebets to assemble a research team and purchase specialized equipment that helps her "tease out" communication methods of multiple species of arachnids. She looks at why animals use certain signals to communicate with each other and which animals are capable of receiving different signal modalities. She also explores how selection has driven signals to evolve over time. "We're finding that most animals use more than one sensory modality when they communicate," Hebets said. "The question is, why are they picking these modalities? How can we explain the diversity of signaling seen across species? People have been interested in this since before Darwin, and have tried to explain what selection pressures have driven the evolution of certain traits - for us, signals are the traits of interest." Until recently, Hebets said, people have examined one sensory component - for example the coloration of male cardinals - so there's a tremendous foundation of literature on each of these components in isolation. Recently, there has been increasing interest in the multi-modal aspect of signaling. Hebets and her team are currently immersed in a large-scale comparative study of one particular genus of wolf spider. Within this genus, males of some species possess black brushes of hair on their legs and produce seismic signals; other close relatives have no pigmentation or brushes, but use a seismic signal; and still others have pigmentation on certain parts of their legs and do some "intermediate leg waving" and seismic signaling. "There is so much diversity in this genus, it allows us look at what females are paying attention to and how signals might be related to the signaling environment," Hebets said. She and her team record the spiders' signaling with a laser vibrometer, which records seismic signals without disrupting them. In addition, they run tests in light and in the dark, on granite or on filter paper. In doing this, they oblate each signal (visual and seismic) and then run mate choice trials and assess what females are paying attention to. Some males are fed a higher quality diet than their peers, so that researchers can also see if female spiders can detect these "higher quality" males. They also utilize video playbacks - running video sequences of male spiders on tiny television screens - to elicit responses from females. That way, Hebets said, you can manipulate the visual signals in a way that would be difficult with live animals. "We're right in the middle of this research, we've already gotten through six or seven species," she said. "We got an incredible amount done in the first year, now we have to think about the data we collected." One branch of her research analyzes how the perception of two different modalities influences learning. Evidence suggests that people have an increased ability to learn if they receive information from two different modalities. Hebets ran a study with jumping spiders that showed the same results. A female spider can learn to distinguish differences in two colors in the presence of a seismic stimulus better than in the absence of a seismic stimulus. Hebets also conducted a study that showed that when a female has experience with a certain type of male before she matures, that experience affects whom she mates with. In short, formative experiences affect lifelong decision-making. "We can see that these seemingly complex behaviors are happening in groups with more simple nervous systems. You get a sense that maybe 20 years in the future this information could potentially help us develop medications to help people overcome traumatic experiences they had as children," she said. A hallmark of Hebets's teaching and research - for which she was awarded a Harold and Esther Edgerton Junior Faculty Award this spring - is her collaborative work with students. "I have always worked really closely with undergrads, probably because the only reason I am where I am today is because of my undergrad research experience," Hebets said. "My students at UNL are really motivated and ambitious, so the impact research has on them is really rewarding." 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