14 DAY TRIAL // Most people are all too familiar with the behavior of Black Widow female spiders. Long story short, these females are said to kill and eat males shortly after mating with them.
According to a research whose findings have recently been published in the scientific journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, the practice of cannibalism is not limited to Black Widow female spiders.
Quite the contrary: males belonging to a species known to the scientific community as Micaria sociabilis sometimes kill and consume females.
As far as the researchers can tell, their doing so has little to do with the females' appearance, and quite a lot to do with their age.
Thus, even if a female happened to be a tad bigger, which is taken as good sign in the world of spiders, a male would not hesitate to kill it, provided that the female was a bit too old for his taste.
Springer says that this proves that, in the case of certain species of spiders, males do have a choice when it comes to picking a mate and do not hesitate to resort to this so-called reverse cannibalism to express their approval or disapproval of a female.
“Our study provides an insight into an unusual mating system, which differs significantly from the general model,” the researchers write in their paper.
“Even males may choose their potential partners and apparently, in some cases, they can present their choice as extremely as females do by cannibalizing unpreferred mates,” the study further explains.
The Masaryk University in the Czech Republic researchers who pieced together this study reached their conclusions concerning the mating behavior of Micaria sociabilis spiders following their monitoring males and females belonging to this species throughout the course of two years.
By forcing males to interact with females of different sizes, ages and mating status, specialists Lenka Sentenska and Stano Pekar have discovered that the former typically choose not to mate with the latter, and kill them instead.
It appears that this type of behavior is most common amongst younger males.