Ow. Just ow.
Then there’s the spider Larinia jeskovi. A new study, published Nov. 5 in Current Biology, shows that in this particular species, the male mutilates his paramour’s genitalia, thus ensuring that he’s the only one fathering the kids, IFLScience reports.
It’s thought this is the first time males have been observed disfiguring the female’s sex organ after mating. Virgin females have a weirdly-shaped blob, known as the “scapus,” located above the genitalia. However, that winds up missing in females that have mated, the scientists discovered.
Biologist Gabriele Uhl and her colleagues at the University of Greifswald, in Germany, pondered this and decided to find out what caused the scapus to go missing, National Geographic reports.
They did this by catching wild L. jeskovi, allowing the spiders to mate while under careful observation in the lab. Once the male successfully mounted a virgin female, the researchers zapped them frozen with blasts of liquid nitrogen. Now, Uhl and her team had the chance to microscopically examine the spiders’ interlocked genitals.
Freezing the critters in the act was a challenge because their trysts last just seconds.
“We had to be super quick and super lucky,” Uhl said.
In spiders, the male delivers sperm with its pedipalps, two leg-like appendages close to its mouth. The pedipalps lock onto the female’s scapus from above and below, National Geographic reports.
When the researchers scanned the spiders’ microscopic genitalia, they found that the male L. jeskovi grasps and twists the female’s scapus when he dismounts, snipping it off as if using scissors. For the female, the scapus serves as a handle; without it, other males can’t grasp the female at all, and this prevents her from having another sex partner.
According toThe International Business Times, the scientists said all of the female spiders that mated under lab observation had been mutilated in this fashion. Researchers suspect that 80 other spider species exhibit this unusual behavior.
It turns out that snipping off the female’s love handle might actually be beneficial for her, National Geographic notes. That’s because female spiders can store sperm for years, and this means having only one partner might not hamper her fertility.
Also, preventing other males from getting a pedipalp in the door may be an effective way to make sure the female doesn’t have to share her meals with random suitors.
Interestingly, as mentioned above, some species of male orb-web spiders break off their sex organs, or palps, and use them to plug the female’s sex organ, which also prevents her from mating with other males, thus increasing the odds of his being the only male fathering offspring, Animals reports.
There’s been a lot of hype about female spiders being cannibals, but it’s largely just that — hype. While many species don’t do this, there are a few. The black widow (Latrodectus mactans) is well-known for devouring the male after sex, and in another species of orb-weaver, Argiope bruennichi, the female actually begins eating the male while they are still mating. And even though he’s being eaten, he still continues to mate so that he can inseminate the female. Unsurprisingly, for around 70 percent of males this is the first — and last time they ever mate.
Spider sex. The stuff of which nightmares are made.
