Statistics of Social Spiders: postscript

Some new information has just scuttled across my desk!

It seems that there is in fact a type of social spider, and a recent paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society has looked at the role of social interaction amongst these creatures (Stegodyphus Mimosarum).

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/39577/title/Behavior-Brief/

This is all very well, but has someone counted these spiders up and ascertained if the counts fit a Poisson distribution (e.g. are these spiders Poisson-ous (!!!), or some other distribution, (and what are their views on competing sundew plants?)

 

Laskowski KL, Pruitt JN (March, 2014). Evidence of social niche construction: persistent and repeated social interactions generate stronger personalities in a social spider. Proc Royal Society B.

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Author: Dr Dean McKenzie

I hold a BA(Honours) in Psychology from Deakin University, and much more recently, a PhD in Psychiatric Epidemiology (Classification & Regression Trees) from Monash University (2009) I have many years experience applying classical (e.g. ANOVA), contemporary (e.g. quantile regression) and data mining (e.g. trees, bagging, boosting, random forests) to psychological, medical and health data using Stata, IBM SPSS, Salford CART and open source Weka, as well as in statistical consulting, and advising people of many different levels of stats experience