Signature Spiders are known to show signs of cannibalism. In several spider species, females eat the males after sex.
Try to Observe closely you might even spot a small ‘male-signature spider’!
These spiders are known to show signs of cannibalism. In several spider species, females eat the males after sex. While the exact reason for such behaviour seems to be a mystery to us, studies have suggested that there are various complex evolutionary reasons involving costs and benefits to the species, sperm competition and esoteric sexual selection schemes.
Interestingly, the only motivation for this creepy cannibalistic behaviour is much more simple!
It’s all about the SIZE.
If males are small, they’re easier to catch and therefore more likely to be prey, says Shawn Wilder and Ann Rypstra from Miami University in Ohio. Big females eat their puny mates simply because a) they’re hungry and b) they can.
According to an NBCNews report, Wilder and Rypstra found that among the wolf spider (Hogna helluo), large males were never eaten by their mates, while small males were consumed 80 percent of the time.
Discovering this, the researchers then pored over the literature and found the size rule to hold true in a wide range of spider species.
“We were surprised to find that such a simple characteristic such as how small males are relative to females has such a large effect on the frequency of sexual cannibalism,” Wilder said.
Incidentally, the most well-known example of spider-women eating spider-men is the black widow.
However, this behaviour has been observed across many spider species and the case is overstated. For most of the many species of black widows, cannibalism is the exception, not the rule, suggests Rod Crawford of the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture at the University of Washington.
The Nemophilist 