If they’re a male black widow spider, that is. Simply by taking a little saunter across the female’s web, a male black widow can sense if a female is hungry or not. Why does it matter? Because female black widow spiders have a rather freaky habit of eating the male after mating. It’s how they earned their dangerous name.
Now that's one massive female black widow spider. You would almost think she's been doing some seriously heavy weights at the gym. But nope, females are normally much bigger than males. Those males best watch out!
Males have developed this very useful technique, which tells them whether or not a female has recently eaten. But if a female is hungry, she would be more likely to cannibalize the male spider. They take a sniff of those silk strands and then decide if they want to proceed or scurry away. A new study discovered this interesting skill and published the findings in the journal Animal Behaviour. So, how do researchers actually go about testing something like this?
Feeding Time For The Ladies
First things first. The researchers fed a bunch of hungry female back widow spiders. Using a cricket neatly held between forceps, they rested it on the web and waited for the female to come over, wrap the cricket in silk and chow down. The females got one cricket each week. Yet, by the time the fourth week came around, they weren’t so hungry anymore and didn’t really want to eat the crickets.
I bet this female black widow spider is thinking: "Ah, the satisfaction from a good meal of crickets. I think I'll accept the advances of the male spider perched nearby. Since I'm well fed, I probably won't eat him after we're done."
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