It’s been a long-standing joke that female spiders eat their partners after mating because of ttes, hat tongue-in-cheek expression that females devour males. But while species like the black widow and the wolf spider do in fact resort to cannibalism once they’ve got what they need from a mating ritual with a male, science has yet to unquestionably discover why this occurs.
What a recent study does prove, is that female wolf spiders don’t seem to eat their mates after sex for the sake of hunger. This has been determined based on the fact that they only devour approximately 51% of the male spider’s body, substantially less than they would another creature they prey upon like a cricket. While it’s possible that they eat their mates when they’re starving, this doesn’t explain why it has become a fairly common part of the mating ritual of a spider.
Female wolf spiders typically dine upon their mates after 3 to 5 mating sessions. Researchers have suggested that this might just be a way of eliminating competition, or maybe it’s just a way to make sure that the male’s not going to be making another booty call.
Researchers admit that further study is necessary to determine why some female spiders turn into cannibals, eating their male mates rather than their more nutritionally beneficial female counterparts – but it’s pretty clear it’s not about food.
Image Credit: Flickr User Kilarin with a Creative Commons License
