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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> This isn’t a case of one species outcompeting another for food or habitat. In research published Monday in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America, biologists found that young brown widow spiders have a dramatic tendency to seek out and kill their American cousins.

That sounds like... a case of one species outcompeting another for habitat. What does Asher Elbein think territorial competition normally looks like? I'll call the tree, and you call the tree, and whoever it goes to gets to live in it?

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It’s outright predation, which is a little different. The idea here is that the Brown Widows aren’t eating the Black Widows’ food sources, or otherwise infringing on their niche- they are just straight up eating them.

Like you wouldn’t describe us as “outcompeting” Bluefin Tuna, but we are doing our best to drive them to extinction by eating them.

If one Maori tribe wins a battle with another tribe, occupies its territory, and eats the slain losers, would we describe that as "competition" or "predation"?

We don't describe ourselves as "outcompeting" tuna because they don't have anything we want.

But the brown widows are infringing on the black widows' niche; they are specifically described as occupying the territory they're removing the black widows from and it's a safe bet that, with their webs in the same places, they're eating the same things. The human population of the ocean remains at zero.

These are biological terms and mean things. Outcompeting means something else then predation. Maori example falls into politics and the words to be used there would be war, genocide and cannibalism.

Not quite predation either, because despite eating then, it is unlikely the whole thing was purely about food. On the other hand, spiders don't go to wars, they do not coordinate nor make plans.

I would assume it means having more babies and getting eaten less often by predators relative the competitor.

I would assume so too, but according to the article, the brown widow youth are predating specifically on black widows.

Having more babies can't produce the effect that the competitor's population goes down over time. You have to do something to hurt them.

That might be eating their food, or leading predators to them, or killing them yourself, but unless you do something to hurt them, the territory they hold is going to grow over time, not shrink.

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