Most eight-legged bachelors go to great lengths to avoid being eaten by their lover: Some try to massage her into a stupor , or bind her legs up with silk ; others play dead , or detach their own legs to distract her with a precoital snack. Certain male widow spiders, however, have a very different view of these horrific meet-cutes. And yet males offer themselves willingly, almost insistently.
Even when given the opportunity to couple with females that are less likely to cannibalize them, males will select the man-eating mates. In this murder, the male is both victim and accomplice, spinning a web of mystery around their leggy liaison.
Read: A truly remarkable spider. The longer the male multitasks, the more eggs he fertilizes; the tips of his pedipalps may also snap off, plugging the entrance to the pouch where the female stores sperm, and making it more difficult for another suitor to deposit semen inside. Most of them wander the landscape and die as virgins, never managing to locate a female at all. The few that do must then surmount a series of obstacles to initiate sex. Ironically, all of their precopulatory efforts are in service of not getting eaten; priority No.
Clearing all those hurdles once is impressive; twice or more, truly improbable. Read: The world shifts when a black widow squats. Some widow males actually survive long enough to copulate twice twice! Females each harbor two sperm-storage organs, which must be filled one at a time.
The fangs still puncture him, and the digestive process begins; by the time their second date is through, the female has finished the job. Other males might not get eaten by their paramour at all. A few years ago, Andrade and her colleagues discovered that widow males can slash their risk of being cannibalized by mating with females in a late-juvenile stage. The males, meanwhile, glean an obvious benefit: They only rarely somersault for subadultsβand almost always emerge from sex unscathed.
