Biological Sciences Colloquium: Madi Rittinger

Madi Rittinger, PhD candidate in the Rodríguez lab, will be presenting a talk about her work entitled “Small but mighty: The behavioral and cognitive abilities of spiders.”  The abstract is as follows:

Animals come in a large range of body sizes ranging from monumentally large mammals such as whales to microscopically small insects such as parasitoid wasps. Interestingly, these small animals are not simply reduced versions of their larger counterparts. For example, the size of an animal’s brain (both overall size and relative to body size) varies widely across body sizes, yet we find little to no deficit in the behavioral and cognitive abilities of smaller animals. In this talk we will explore the behavioral and cognitive abilities of spiders. Not only are spiders on theme with Halloween, they are also a fantastic model organism for studying how being small may impact their abilities. Together we will explore how spiders solve problems, capture prey, and how being small impacts their brain size. This work will showcase that although spiders are small, they are mighty in the abilities they possess and that this work can be used to inform many fields of biology ranging from ecology and evolution to neurophysiology.

The presentation will begin at 3:00 PM in Lapham Hall N101, preceded by an informal reception from 2:45-3:00 PM.