We all know how severe conjugation can be in the world of spiders , especially for the males . If he ’s notrisking his lifeto get one lucky snapshot at inseminating the distaff , he’s“castrating ” himselfto secure up the female person so no further suitors can do the deed . But new research has documented how in one species , it seems that the female person is the one getting the raw destruction of the deal during sexual urge .
In a move to guarantee that he will be the sole father of all offspring , males of the spiderLarinia jeskovimutilate the external partsof the females ’ genitals , forestall her from mating with any other males afterwards . This drastic and unmediated method acting is think to be the first time that male person have been observed disfigure the females ’ sex electric organ after mating . Virgin females have what is call the “ scapus , ” an odd - shaped blob place above the genitalia . But after breeding , the scientists found this to be missing .
In social club to fully understand what actually goes on during mating , the wanderer postulate to be observed really have sex . But matte only goes on for a matter of seconds , so to get them at it , the researchers decided to freeze them in the act , literally . capture wild specimens , the scientist lease them start couple and then blast them with melted nitrogen . This allowed them to then take the frozen spiders , still interlocked , and examine what precisely is going on under a micro - CT - scan .
They found that when a male person comes in to mate , he grab the scapus to get a good wait of the female and then give birth his sperm using appendages discover near his rima oris . After he has deposited his come and dismount , he twists the scapus off . This means that no male after him can go up the female , ensuring that all the young are now his . The paper describing this behavior is bring out inCurrent Biology .
But it might not all be doom and gloom for the female , as there could in reality be advantages to let the male to do the clipping . distaff spiders are know to be able to salt away sperm from the same male for years , and so it might be that she could continue laying eggs for some prison term to come even though she ’s only mated once . It might also mean that because she is now unavailable , she is less likely to be harassed by other male person . With 80 species of wanderer known to have a scapus , the research worker suspect that this behavior might be surprisingly common .
Main image : A wanderer of the species Larinia underage , alike to the Larinia jeskovi count at in this study . Carlos De Soto Molinari / Flickr CC BY - NC - ND 2.0
