Sometimes sex just isn’t worth your life. For male black widow spiders
, standing at just a quarter of the size of their mates, sex involves a very real danger: females of the species have no qualms about turning cannibalistic if they’re hungry after getting down and dirty. But it seems that it’s more than just a game of chance for horny male spiders. Researchers at Arizona State University have now learned
that simply walking on the webs of female spiders can provide males with chemical cues telling them if their potential mates are ravenous enough to eat them. In the study published in the journal Animal Behavior
, researchers routinely fed one group of female spiders for several weeks while starving another group (noticeably shrinking their sizes). They then looked at the courtship behavior of the male spiders in a series of tests. In the first experiment, the researchers ...
