Group living and inbreeding depression in a subsocial spider

Social spiders are unusual among social organisms in being highly inbred-males and females mature within their natal nest and mate with each other to produce successive generations. Several lines of evidence suggest that in spiders inbred social species originated from outbred subsocial ancestors, a transition expected to have been hindered by inbreeding depression. As a window into this transition, we examined the fitness consequences of artificially imposed inbreeding in the naturally outbred subsocial spider Anelosimus cf. jucundus. Subsocial spiders alternate periods of solitary and social living and are thought to resemble the ancestral system from which the inbred social species originated. We found that inbreeding depression in this subsocial spider only becomes evident in spiders raised individually following the end of their social phase and that ecological and demographic factors such as eclosion date, number of siblings in the group and mother's persistence are more powerful determinants of fitness during the social phase. A potential explanation for this pattern is that maternal care and group living provide a buffer against inbreeding depression, a possibility that may help explain the repeated origin of inbred social systems in spiders and shed light on the origin of other systems involving regular inbreeding.