by hilzoy
Via Unfogged, a story on sexual cannibalism. Becks couldn’t figure out what to excerpt, and I can see why; you should read the whole bizarre thing. However, a taste (as it were):
“Male Australian redback spiders court females for up to eight hours by plucking the strands of their web. Once a male starts to mate, he promptly somersaults onto her fangs. He continues to mate as she feeds on him. In some cases, the male crawls a short distance away, courts the female again, and then mates a second time. He flips onto her fangs, and by the end of the second mating he is dead.”
(Nobody tell Christina Hoff Sommers about this…)
And:
“Scientists have found other species in which males encourage their own cannibalism. One remarkable twist on this strategy is seen in a species of orb-weaving spiders. The males suddenly die as they mate. The male’s death may be a strategy for preventing other males from mating with the female. In death, its sexual organ becomes stuck in the female’s receptacle. Even if she feeds on the rest of his body, the organ remains behind, preventing her from receiving more sperm.”
I hadn’t ever asked myself whether I’d like to be an orb-weaving spider before tonight, but now I can say with complete certainty that I am really, really glad that I’m not one. Nor a redback, nor a Chinese mantis:
“Some sexual cannibals, including female Chinese mantises, actually eat a lot of males. “One study estimated that 63 percent of the diet of females are male mantids,” Dr. Brown said. “So they’re the main food source.””
No: I’m glad I’m just an ordinary human female. (She said, not having noticed the tiny radioactive spider descending towards her, spinning through the dark on a tiny glowing thread…)
I am so not going here. “Somersaults onto her fangs”…although this does sound distressingly familiar as abstracted to one of N courtship-ritual catastrophes I have witnessed (not saying whether I was the suicidal one, note).
Q. What does an Australian male redback spider say when he sees a female.
A. Croikey
It’s the last two paragraphs that have the more universal message.
Dr. Brown also wonders whether female mantises have evolved ways to lure males to eat. Female mantises depend so much on male mantises for their diet that natural selection may favor females that can attract more males. Dr. Brown notes that male mantises are drawn to females by the odor of pheromones. He is investigating whether female mantises use the pheromones as a trap, rather than an honest signal.
“The most intriguing situation would be a mated female that’s hungry,” Dr. Brown said. “Does she boost her pheromones, not because she needs sperm but because she needs food?”
Hilzoy, so my impression of you as a man-eater was all wrong?
(another illusion down the drain…)
Hilzoy is really, really happy to be a mammal,
considering the mating rituals of other species. (Obsidian Wings)…
She’ll only come out at night
The lean and hungry type
Nothing is new, I’ve seen her here before
Watching and waiting
Shes sitting with you but her eyes are on the door
So many have paid to see
What you think youre getting for free
The woman is wild, a she-cat tamed by the purr of a jaguar
Money’s the matter
If you’re in it for love you ain’t gonna get too far
Oh here she comes
Watch out boy shell chew you up
Oh here she comes
Shes a maneater
That’s nothing – I’ve read (in Britannica, IIRC) that you can lead a dragonfly to devour itself if you put its own tail end near its mouth.
In my work as a lobbyist, which involved WAY too much contact with the rabid radical feminists, I became convinced that female humans sometimes do eat the males. They simply do it by proxy, using the family law courts and the societal bias against all things male. Many of the men I heard from would honestly have preferred death; some of them did kill themselves rather than provide the financial and emotional fodder for their own disassembly.
I have a relative who is a mammal, and he had exactly the same problem.
On the other hand, if I don’t get those kitchen cabinets in soon, well, whatever happens will be my fault.
the societal bias against all things male
heh. that’s funny.
die italics, die.
I first learned about the Orb Weaver from the most excellent Aussie band TISM (who are probably the first band ever to use the word “pedipalp” in a lyric), and if we can quote favorite lyrics on this topic at length, I should include it, from Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me:
All our lives have to die, of that there’s no help
My favorite way to end ’em
Is the Orb Weaver spider whose pedipald
Enters the female pudendum
Then he dies on the spot his corpse is still stuck
Left for his rivals to curse it.
He would rather die than not get to ****
Personally, I reckon its worth it!
I don’t get this.
By remaining a mammal, you will never know the exquisite pleasure of noshing on spent spider corpse while reposing in afterglow.
(I mean, even as a human you can *try* it, but I’m doubting you’ll get the pleasure.)
I suspect this goes into the category of “if you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it!”
Which is what they tell reluctant male spiders, too.
Insect mating behavior is an excellent argument for Malicious Design. My all time favorite is Xylocaris Maculipennis, in which some males stab through the carapace of other males, injecting sperm directly into the body cavity. The sperm swims to the appropriate location, and when the victim mates the female is impregnated by the stabber. I’ve seen this referred to as “homosexual stabbing rape.”
Quite possibly the most revolting blog post I have ever read. Ever.
Quite possibly the most revolting blog post I have ever read. Ever.
Y’all need to frquent the biology science blogs more….
I predict that he won’t find any such thing. Selection for “signaling” alleles (e.g. “handicaps” but also pheromone composition) has gotten a lot of attention in the wake of the handicap principle, and AFAIK the results have been very consistent. “Dishonest” signaling (we’re not talking camouflage or mimcry here) tends to be very transitory, and the mechanisms that discourage it have turned out to have not only a very strong theoretical basis but a good deal of experimental support as well. If he does find something like that it’ll be pretty unusual, maybe even groundbreaking.
To clarify, there’s nothing unusual about females who attract males and then try to eat them instead of having sex with them (actually it is sort of rare among mammals I guess ;-). But if the female is genuinely infertile at the time, or otherwise un-impregnable by the males being attracted then it would be very difficult to explain. In fact the more I think about it the more groundbreaking I think it would be.
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Interesting stuff, radish, thanks for posting it. If I had been given the opportunity to name the Handicap Principle, I probably would’ve called it the Smucker’s Principle instead, in honor of their old commercial — “with a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good”.
togolosh–
the thing is that in a few more generations, some mutant male will figure out how to metabolize the alien sperm injected into it and turn it to a caloric profit.
Then that mutant will out-breed other males, and the homosexual stab-rapers will lose their advantage to the new, sperm-metabolizing males.
Until some later, even more grotesque round of mutations and selective pressures.
Thing is, it isn’t personal. It’s just business.
Why is it that everyone but mammals gets to come up with these wierd and fascinating adaptations?
OK, the Have Sex & Die! stuff doesn’t send me (though it sure sounds like a right-wing fundmentalist’s favorite fantasy).
But… When’s the last time you heard of a mammal growing its own nightlight, or its own fishing lure, or a gorgeous feather crest, or a really cool set of dorsal spikes?
I’m kind of jealous.
“But… When’s the last time you heard of a mammal growing its own nightlight, or its own fishing lure, or a gorgeous feather crest, or a really cool set of dorsal spikes?”
This guy is rather singular.
Oh, god, yes: the monotremes!
An lj’er, eyetooth, occasionally posts amazing bits about wonderfully wierd animals. About a year ago, she wrote about monotremes. The platypus is definitely a charmingly odd critter, but it’s got nothin’ on its coz, the echidna.
Here’s eyetooth on echidna love:
“Echidna mating is mysterious and primordial. It is also rarely observed, but the following seem to be the basics.
It begins when the female goes into estrus. Males, usually three or four of them, but sometimes as many as eleven, start following her around in a long single-file line called an “echidna train” (or even “echidna love train”). It seems very civilized, though it can go on for as long as six weeks, during which time the otherwise solitary animals eat and sleep in each other’s company, and the males nip the female’s tail, which seems to be a kind of foreplay.
Eventually the female echidna climbs partway up a tree, or buries part of herself in the dirt, leaving the males to walk around and around her until they have created a circular rut in the ground. (Sometimes there’s only one male, in which case, nothing daunted, he kind of walks back and forth by himself until he has created a little ditch.)
Then they engage in a shoving contest. The males that get shoved out of the ditch acknowledge defeat and leave peacefully until only one, the best shover, is left. He gets to mate with the female — very carefully, because they are both covered with spines. (Understandably, echidnas do it face to face, so don’t listen to anyone who tells you that this is a uniquely human behavior.) The male’s four-headed penis, which he does not use to urinate, emerges only during the act of mating; the rest of the time he is indistinguishable from a female echidna, as his testicles are also inside his body.”
Love train! Morris dancing! Gentlemanly Indian wrestling! A four-headed penis!
What’s not to love?
So, OK, mammals have some glorious strangenesses to call their own.
I’d still like some peacock feathers, tho.
Echidna Love Train would be a great name for a MMMFFFRRGGHH All right, all right! I’m going!
On a lighter note than the depressing rant I put into the Darfur thread, I received today a packet of continuing legal education seminar brochures. Since I am required to take 12 hours of CLE per year, I am often on the lookout for new topics.
The only potentially relevant one for my job (i.e., the only one I could conceive of getting my company to pay for) was a seminar entitled Understanding Plans and Surveys, so I looked through the topics covered. One of them was “How to Properly Fold a Plan”. While fortunately this is only 5 minutes out of 3 hours of course time, that still seems too much.
It may not be very strange or unusual, but humans have soem anatomical and physiological adaptations for group sex. Supposedly seminal fluid has a spermicide in it to destroy the sperm of subsequnet males, and also the shape of the glans, flanged, is suitable for pulling out previously deposited seminal fluid.