Male Orb Weavers Cheat Death With a Leap

In many species of spiders, copulation is followed by a meal, as the female devours her mate. La petite mort becomes une grosse mort, as far as the dude is concerned.

The male of one species of orb weaver (Philoponella prominens) has figured out a way to survive the otherwise fatal coupling – by catapulting himself out of harm’s way the moment the date is over. His escape is so fast the human eye can’t follow it.

Now researchers at Hubei University in Wuhan, China have captured the great escapes with high-speed cameras. “We found that mating was always ended by a catapulting, which is so fast that common cameras could not record the details clearly,” says Shichang Zhang of Hubei.

Zhang and colleagues monitored 300 individual spiders living within a single web complex. There they witnessed 155 successful matings, with 152 concluding with the male catapulting to safety. The three males that didn’t launch in time were promptly eaten by their femme fatale mates.

The male prepares for the jump by folding his tibia-metatarsus joint against the female during the act. At the moment of release, hydraulic pressure unlooses a rapid expansion in the joint and poof! he’s outta there. Truly a happy ending.
“We observed that males that could not perform the catapulting were cannibalized by the female,” Zhang says. “It suggests that this behavior evolved to fight against female’s sexual cannibalism under strong predation pressure of females.”
The research is published in the journal Current Biology. Watch the big jump here: youtube.com/watch?v=gpg5zsMMTIE.

Photo credit: Shichang Zhang