In a first, male spiders at risk of getting eaten by females have evolved a clever escape: They launch their bodies into the air after mating
, an arachnologist at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, who wasn’t involved in the study."I don't know of other studies that have shown that.”is a common resident of gardens, fields, and forests, forming colonies of 300 or more spiders. Binford, who has studied orb weavers in Peru, describes their homes as “an apartment complex, where each spider has their own little orb web that’s connected to the others by some silk scaffolding.
To observe this catapulting up close, Zhang and colleagues collected young spiders from a nearby garden and reared them in isolation in the lab. The team then placed one unmated male into the web of one unmated female, recording their interactions. The team kept the female well fed on fruit flies so hunger wouldn’t influence how she treated the male.
In a separate set of experiments, researchers tested the effects of modifying male spiders’ means of escape in different ways, such as removing a pair of front legs. Those impaired males, like the males that didn’t leap in time, became literal dinner dates, the researchers foundBy poring over the high-speed cameras’ high-resolution images frame by frame, the research team “found out the secret of catapulting,” Zhang says.
Males also make a dragline—a piece of silk—that lands them in their web a good distance away from the female. This anchor is a safety measure “in case the females are aggressive and suddenly come over to kill them,” Zhang says.
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