Dammit Jim!

Spiders males are often cannibalized by their mates after sex. Spiders have two penis-like organs, called pedipalps, which usually break during sex meaning male spiders can only have sex twice. I wasn’t going to write about anymore spider sex but I came across a couple articles about the adaptations that can occur since males with no remaining pedipalps males are evolutionary useless. Often females help their mates find purpose by using the male as dinner. Scientists had thought that this was an example of competition between the sexes with the large female taking advantage of the undersized male (like the picture to the left). Sort of a male spiders are from Mars, female spiders are from Cannibal World Centauri 6. But in 1996 M. C. B. Andrade noticed that males of the redback spider actually perform a difficult somersault maneuver just to position their bodies in prime eating position (her video).

While I am in danger of feeding my reputation as sexually fixated, I did want to put up one more post about weird mating systems before moving onto other non-sexual types of biology. I was taking a quick look at the literature after the post about spider genital breakage and came across an interesting paper on mating in queenless ants (Dinoponera quadriceps). These ants are really interesting in and of themselves and I think I’ll write more about them later. But for now, they have a pretty curious way of mating that manages to one-up the spiders.