missing spiders

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Spending a quiet evening at home in the middle of winter, reading my favorite writer of natural history—David Quammen, who manages to serve up curious observations with a garish of good humor—I'm reminded how much I miss spiders mostly because they are fun to watch and contemplate and imagine their eight-eyed, eight-legged world. Isn't it so Rikki?

Here's what Quammen writes about spider sex:

"Spiders do their mating with pedipalps, another form of modified leg, to which sperm is applied from a separate male orifice, like guacamole on a chip, before insertion. The male of the black widow spider bears on its pedipalp a fine, pointy structure called an embolus, the tip of which breaks off inside the female (bad enough in itself, but portending an even worse fate in store for the poor little dude)."

-Quote from "The Boilerplate Rhino" by David Quammen

Indeed. The Southern black widow, Latrodectus mactans, practices sexual cannibalism, defined as when a "female organism kills and consumes her mate before, during or after copulation." (Talk about a bad first date! For goodness sake, wouldn't eating your mate before copulation be counter productive?)

So the poor little black widow dude deserves our empathy. Forget his pointy, fine embolus, the female often (but not always) eats the much smaller male after they mate. I guess if you got to go, dying after sex is better than choking on a peanut butter sandwich.

Speaking of which, I think I'm out of milk. I'd better go to the store.

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