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Female spiders are fine-tuned to detect and quickly respond to prey vibrations, presenting a challenge to courting males who must attract a female’s attention but not be mistaken for prey. This is likely particularly important at the onset of courtship when a male enters a female’s web. In web-dwelling spiders, little is known about how males solve this conundrum, or about their courtship signals. Here we used laser Doppler vibrometry to study the vibrations produced by males and prey (house flies and crickets) on tangle webs of the western black widow  Latrodectus hesperus  and on sheet webs of the hobo spider  Tegenaria agrestis . We recorded the vibrations at the location typically occupied by a hunting female spider. We compared the vibrations produced by males and prey in terms of their waveform, dominant frequency, frequency bandwidth, amplitude and duration. We also played back recorded male and prey vibrations through the webs of female  L. hesperus  to determine the vibratory parameters that trigger a predatory response in females.    Results  We found overlap in waveform between male and prey vibrations in both  L. hesperus  and  T. agrestis . In both species, male vibrations were continuous, of long duration (on average 6.35 s for  T. agrestis  and 9.31 s for  L. hesperus) , and lacked complex temporal patterning such as repeated motifs or syllables. Prey vibrations were shorter (1.38 - 2.59 s), sporadic and often percussive. Based on the parameters measured, courtship signals of male  L. hesperus  differed more markedly from prey cues than did those of  T. agrestis . Courtship vibrations of  L. hesperus  males differed from prey vibrations in terms of dominant frequency, amplitude and duration. Vibrations of  T. agrestis  males differed from prey in terms of duration only. During a playback experiment,  L. hesperus  females did not respond aggressively to low-amplitude vibrations irrespective of whether the playback recording was from a prey or a male.    Conclusions  Unlike courtship signals of other spider species, the courtship signals of  L. hesperus  and  T. agrestis  males do not have complex temporal patterning. The low-amplitude ‘whispers’ of  L. hesperus  males at the onset of courtship are less likely to trigger a predatory response in females than the high-amplitude vibrations of struggling prey.

A meal or a male: the ‘whispers’ of black widow males do not trigger a predatory response in females