Nature is Neat, episode #9331
Saturday, 25 June 2005 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daI just heard an amazing story on Quirks and Quarks, CBC Radio's weekly science show. Bob interviewed a scientist at U of Toronto who studies sexual adaptation in spiders. In particular, she was talking about an Australian species named Redback spiders whose males are not only eaten after copulation (like Black Widows)... but they are eaten during copulation. Gruesome detail about how the male is able to continue performing after she's started digesting his abdomen. And in fact, they have adapted so that he needs to survive the first round, do a second courting dance with her for 20 minutes, and copulate with her a second time, for the fertilization to be successful. The second time, she finishes him off, and there isn't even a reason for them to adapt so the male survives the second encounter; since chances are close to zero that any male redback could successfully live in the wild long enough to court a second female; they get exactly one shot to transmit their genes, and only one.
The scientist got to say, "And if you think that's weird, it gets better, because... " about five times during the story. I won't give spoilers, because you can listen to an mp3 yourself, which does the story much better justice than I can.
Apart from the "gawd that's bizarre" aspect, the part that's most fascinating to me is that science has no answers for why it's favourable for the species to specifically adapt so she starts eating his body while he's copulating, instead of waiting till he's done. Though there's a nifty bit where she did explain how he manages to keep her from eating his essential internal organs during the first round.
The scientist got to say, "And if you think that's weird, it gets better, because... " about five times during the story. I won't give spoilers, because you can listen to an mp3 yourself, which does the story much better justice than I can.
Apart from the "gawd that's bizarre" aspect, the part that's most fascinating to me is that science has no answers for why it's favourable for the species to specifically adapt so she starts eating his body while he's copulating, instead of waiting till he's done. Though there's a nifty bit where she did explain how he manages to keep her from eating his essential internal organs during the first round.
