Male redback spiders (Latrodectus hasselti) — Australia's version of black widows — flip into females' fangs while mating in order to make sex last longer. They also constrict their abdomens — a maneuver that seems to help them survive the experience of being eaten alive long enough to finish transferring their sperm. Then, they break off their sperm-transferring organs, known as pedipalps, into the females like a cork on a bottle, which prevents other males from inseminating them.
"What makes this system so intriguing is the fact that we are dealing with two species here, which are very closely related," Kardelen Özgün Uludağ, a doctoral student of behavioral biology at the University of Hamburg in Germany, told Live Science in an email. These two species may have separated less than 100,000 years ago, but they still show entirely different behavior and observable traits. "This is very uncommon in animals," she said.
The researchers took these hybrid males and paired them with katipō females so they could watch their mating behavior without any of them getting eaten. Then, they tracked how often the hybrid males backflipped and/or constricted their abdomens at the (presumably baffled) noncannibalistic females.
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Although widow spiders are famed for eating their mates, only a couple of black widow species really do. The Australian redback is one, and the U.S.-based Southern black widow (Latrodectus mactans) is another.
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