phobias

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As a post script to my last scripted post. Even though it was about spider sex—an amusing topic to ponder on a cold winter's evening—it may have given you the willies.

According to another essay by David Quammen from the same aforementioned collection of such, you may have arachnophobia. It seems that some people are born with an innate fear of spiders, while others may have a fear of snakes (ophidiophobia), while others are born with neither. But curiosiously, we humans are not born with a fear of both groups. It's either or neither but not both. It's genetic. You cannot help it.

So, if you are arachnophobic, and even the topic of spider copulation creeps you out, here's a bit of adult snake-logy that you might enjoy instead. Once again, it comes from Quammen:

"A male snake has two penises, which the experts call hemipenes, one for left-sided mating and one for right."

Talk about being ambidextrous.

-Quote from "The Boilerplate Rhino" by David Quammen

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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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