Joe Kahlo
Male spiders engage in courtship rituals while mating, but instead some attack females and tie them up to avoid being eaten.
“Spiders sometimes spend hours luring females to court them, but these guys just go and bite,” says Lenka Sentenská at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada.
So the male does this to extend mating time which helps boost their odds of fatherhood by letting them pass along extra sperm.
Spiders, are arguably the animal kingdoms freakiest lovers!
Some spiders even sacrifice themselves to their mates during sex in an effort to ensure their future offspring’s survival.
“That’s why I love studying spiders,” says study co-author Eileen Hebets of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“You often see these extreme behaviors” that offer insight into evolution.
Female spiders are often larger and certainly more aggressive than their male counterparts.
Often they try to eat the males before they even get a chance to mate!
This is another reason this method comes in handy, if the female is tied up, the males can get away without being eaten.
Males across around 30 spider species are already known to wrap some of the female’s legs in silk before sex in order to temporarily cripple her.
But Alissa Anderson of the Uni of Nebraska-Lincoln researched specifically the nursery web spider.
This was after discovering its one of two documented spider species that spins the veil in midair.
She found that the male spiders had a much greater chance of being eaten by their lovers if they weren’t able to tie them up.
What’s more, males that produced bridal veils had a much better chance of mounting females twice in one sitting than those who couldn’t,
From the spiders perspective, this increased those males’ odds of becoming dads.
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