Talk:Leucauge mariana

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 September 2020 and 17 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Dgoldblum. Peer reviewers: Davidcho122, Kekaze, Shay bala.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:03, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Creating the page

I am a Behavioral Ecology student and I am creating this page as a part of a class assignment. I have found multiple papers on mating and web construction but I have found little else. If there are any papers on distribution, habitat, diet, descriptions, and a picture of this spider please let me know! Dgoldblum (talk) 06:35, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Behavioral Ecology Student Suggestions

This was a well-written and well-rounded article! I really enjoyed reading your article particularly the portion on copulation was especially informative. I made general grammatical adjustments. Seeing that your web section was pretty extensive, I added an image of a general orb weaver web of the same genus to give the readers a general idea of how the webs look. I think it would beneficial to add more image even if not specifically from the mariana species and also elaborate on the description of the spider. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Davidcho122 (talk • contribs) 04:40, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

Recent edits and Credit

After creating the page I reached out to one of the experts on this spider species, Dr. William G. Eberhard, and he helped me with the most recent edits. He sent a lot of the description information based on his observations and improved the web construction section. He helped me with specifics throughout the article as well. I just want to make sure he gets due credit for helping!--Dgoldblum (talk) 23:09, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Fellow student article feedback

Hi Danny! Your article is quite interesting and has very solid content that is well-supported by references. Most of the changes I made were to increase the clarity of the sentence. For example, I changed the term “multiple courtship behaviors…” to “several courtship behaviors…” so as to not give the impression that the spider engages in multiple courtships at a time, but rather simply has several different courtship behaviors it employs. I also added some extra organization to the article, creating new paragraphs where I thought was best. In the introduction, for example, I separated the content about mating plugs into a second paragraph and began it with, “A particularly interesting feature of L. mariana…” I also reorganized the “Mating” section to add a female/male interactions header and relabel the “pre-copulatory sequence” subsection as “courting”, moving it under female/male interactions header. I then also added a subsection on adult sociality within the “Social behavior” section and moved a statement that I felt was misplaced in the “Habitat” section to there. Lastly, I removed redundant information and unnecessary in-text citation mentions in the “Taxonomy” section. Otherwise, I saw no other issues with your article and I wish you luck with your good article status nomination! Shay bala (talk) 05:29, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Leucauge mariana/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Esculenta (talk · contribs) 14:44, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

I will review this article. On the surface, it appears to be well written and contructed, but a deeper dive into the citations reveals problems:

• "Less complete data suggest that the spider may also remember the locations of alterations she encountered previously while she is circling the web laying the sticky spiral, even after having circled 360o. She can distinguish this alteration from a second alteration that she encounters after having circled only 270o. Again, these feats are accomplished even though the spider cannot see the lines in her web and must rely on touch to sense them. Learning has little or no role in orb construction, as tiny spiderlings that are newly emerged from the egg sac build orbs with equally precise spacing between lines and make equally elaborate adjustments to the environment such as limited spaces in which to build their orbs.[18]" I cannot find where in the cited source this statement is supported.
• "Experiments and measurements of webs have demonstrated several surprising mental abilities in L. mariana.[16]" The cited source is about an entirely different species (a sawfly), and does not even mention the article subject. This same source is used as a secondary citation in the final paragraph.
• "In the Valle Central in Costa Rica the spiders are very common among weeds in early secondary growth and along wooded streams. Before the arrival of humans, secondary vegetation of this sort grew near rivers, landslides and tree-fall gaps.[4][5]" What part of this statement is supported by the first cited source?

• Actually, in a different source (Aisenberg et al. 2015), I found this statement: "In the past, both species presumably lived in natural second growth ‘vegetation’, such as along the edges of creeks and rivers, landslides, and tree-fall gaps." So, the article is citing the wrong source.

Based on these examples, it seems the entire article needs to be checked to confirm if the sources support the statements to which they are cited. It seems the nominator has not edited since this article was put up for GAN, but I'll wait a few days to see if this major issue can be addressed. Esculenta (talk) 14:44, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

No response in 10 days; closing review as not promoted. Esculenta (talk) 18:22, 22 January 2021 (UTC)