"Talk about a tangled web"

This is very on-brand for Riddled:

I am totally claiming credit for this concept.https://t.co/8sKdUnJ02c pic.twitter.com/NgIuoXKM6A

— Smut Clyde, X-Ray Haruspex (@SmutClyde) January 29, 2020

In related news, the august research field of spider social structure & leadership turns out to generate more drama than one might have expected. It was not enough to generate titles like these, which would not have been out-of-place at Science Night at The Old Entomologist:

‘Evidence of social niche construction: persistent and repeated social interactions generate stronger personalities in a social spider’

[retracted]

and

'Individual and group performance suffers from social niche disruption'

[retracted]

and

“Persistent social interactions beget more pronounced personalities in a desert-dwelling social spider”

[possibly to be retracted]

No, these and four further papers came under scrutiny at PubPeer. BTW, 'wearing black eye-liner' may well come under the rubric of "Stronger / more-pronounced personalities in a social spider".

Experimental evidence of frequency-dependent selection on group behaviour

Jonathan N. Pruitt, Brendan L. McEwen, Steven T. Cassidy, Gabriella M. Najm, Noa Pinter-Wollman

Author response

Nature Ecology & Evolution (2019) Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Univ... 7 comments

Individual and Group Performance Suffers from Social Niche Disruption

Kate L. Laskowski, Pierre-Olivier Montiglio, Jonathan N. Pruitt

The American Naturalist (2016) 2 comments

Selection for Collective Aggressiveness Favors Social Susceptibility in Social Spiders

Jonathan N. Pruitt, Colin M. Wright, James L.L. Lichtenstein, Gregory T. Chism, Brendan L. McEwen, Ambika Kamath, Noa Pinter-Wollman

Current Biology (2018) Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Un... 2 comments

Persistent social interactions beget more pronounced personalities in a desert-dwelling social spider

Andreas P. Modlmeier, Kate L. Laskowski, Alex E. DeMarco, Anna Coleman, Katherine Zhao, Hayley A. Brittingham, Donna R. McDermott, Jonathan N. Pruitt

Biology Letters (2014) Department of Biological Sciences, University of P... 3 comments

The legacy effects of keystone individuals on collective behaviour scale to how long they remain within a group

Jonathan N. Pruitt, Noa Pinter-Wollman

Author response

Proceedings of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences (2015) BioCircuits Institute, University of California Sa... 5 comments

The Achilles' heel hypothesis: misinformed keystone individuals impair collective learning and reduce group success

Jonathan N. Pruitt, Colin M. Wright, Carl N. Keiser, Alex E. DeMarco, Matthew M. Grobis, Noa Pinter-Wollman

Author response

Proceedings of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences (2016) BioCircuits Institute, University of California Sa... 7 comments

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

It is DISAPPOINTING to see the field roiled by sensationalism and insinuations of data manipulation, without the involvement of Riddled in some capacity.

[H/t RetractionWatch]

Authors questioning papers at nearly two dozen journals in wake of spider paper retraction