Pruitt’s web: Biology professor studies spiders’
organizational behavior
In an artificially created society populated by spiders, the right mix of personality types can help the entire group thrive, while the wrong mix can spell failure. Within the tiny community bounded by the edges of their web, behavior influences life-and-death situations. And sometimes, a monkey can swing in and rip the whole experiment to shreds.
Welcome to the world of Jonathan Pruitt.
An assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences for the past 2½ years, Pruitt studies personality types in specific species of spiders, then looks for the optimal societal composition when he puts them together. Though he happens to work with spiders, similar research can occur with other animals; individual behavior influences how the group lives or dies, whether they mate, and with whom. The work is remarkably analogous to human behavior, and helps to define best practices in creating more efficient organizations, he says.
Pruitt’s work won him the 2014 Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award in the junior scholar category, an honor that “meant quite a lot to me,” he says. “I’m this weird spider biologist … It means that Pitt cares about having me around.”
He was drawn to Pitt by the caliber of its students, as well as the culture of the city.
“It’s this clash of lowbrow grit and cool, sleek style,” he says. “I think the University has that feel, too. You don’t get bored easily with that.”
Pruitt grew up in Orlando, Florida, knowing from an early age that he wanted to work with animals.
“I guess I sort of grew up watching The Crocodile Hunter, where crazy people went outside. I was one of those people [who] was susceptible and inspired by it,” says Pruitt, who worked with lizards, snakes, and sharks in graduate school before meeting Susan Reichert, a professor of animal behavior and ecology at the University of Tennessee who would become both a mentor and, later, a collaborator.
It was Reichert who suggested that he study the handful of spider species that live in colonies sharing a web. Today, Pruitt focuses on two main types: spiders living in Tennessee, and a variety living in Africa’s Kalahari desert, where he travels a few months each year for research, usually with graduate students in tow.
They study the tiny creatures in various situations: How do they respond to predators? How active are they? How do they behave in social settings? Based on those answers, Pruitt determines the spiders' personality type, then color codes them with a swipe of paint before mixing and matching types to create a colony. Their shared webs range in size from roughly the width of a softball to a 2-foot-by-2-foot area, and each houses anywhere from two to 200 spiders.
Like a master clockmaker, Pruitt then sits back and observes what happens next. Do a few individuals shoulder all the work? Do they ostracize toxic personalities and prevent them from reproducing? Which personalities, if the web is destroyed, are able to recover and rebuild?
Pruitt has spent 16 hours building colonies, and then “some monkey comes along and picks up the whole thing and eats it, and my grad students will look on in horror.”
But the humans do not interfere; after all, there are lessons to be learned from natural disasters: “Whether you’re killed by a Godzilla-like creature depends on what kind of buildings you build together,” explains Pruitt, adding that the same is true for humans facing catastrophes.
The fact that most people are repelled by spiders makes him feel especially accomplished when he finds students asking themselves, “What would I do there?” in response to the scenario unfolding within the web.
His most current research thread studies how the personality traits of a so-called “Patient Zero” influences the severity of a disease outbreak; if the wrong type gets the disease, “everybody else is screwed,” he says. “It’s sort of like a Michael Creighton book about spiders.”
In his most recent trip to the Kalahari, Pruitt watched ant colonies attack his spiders, taking note of how his colonies defended themselves in the war.
“You can’t look at these spider societies and not view them with a certain lens,” he said. “At the end of the day, I can get people to put themselves in these spiders’ shoes.”