Why do female spiders 'play dead' during mating?
Among creatures such as spiders and
Please note that this article contains images of spiders, so please be careful if you are not good at it.
Females adopt sexual catalepsy to facilitate mating | Current Zoology | Oxford Academic
https://doi.org/10.1093/cz/zoad010
Female spiders play dead during sex so males don't have to worry about being eaten | Live Science
This time, it was confirmed that pretending to be dead to make mating advantageous is a funnel spider called Aterigena aculeata, which lives in
Aterigena aculeata is known to have 'sexual cannibalism' where the female eats the male after mating. One theory is that females repeatedly mate with excellent males who can escape predation, and that males who cannot escape eat them to judge their mating partners. Males, whose lives are in danger, must be cautious about mating.
On the other hand, it has been found from previous observations that females of Aterigena aculeata exhibit a behavior called 'sexual catalepsy', in which they curl their legs as if they were dead during mating and do not move. By immobilizing the female as if dead, the male can engage in mating without fear of being eaten. I didn't know if I was pretending to be dead.
Therefore, the research team examined females immediately after sexual catalepsy, females shaken in a test tube to cause pseudodeath (
Below, A is a female of Aterigena aculeata in a normal state, B is a female in a sexual catalepsy state, C is an anesthetized female, and D is a female in a tanatosis state.
If the chemicals in sexually catalepsy and anesthetized females are similar, then the male is putting the female to sleep for mating. On the other hand, if it's the same as the Thanatosis female, she would have played herself dead in order to mate with the male.
As a result of the analysis, it was found that females with sexual catalepsy are almost the same as females with tanatosis. This strongly suggests that sexual catalepsy is a female-driven phenomenon.
Mark Elgar of the University of Melbourne, Australia, who co-authored the paper that published the study, said, ``Spiders mate only when the female is in sexual catalepsy, so if the female doesn't do this, copulation will occur. will not continue.'
In addition, even if you mate with a female that seems to be dead due to sexual catalepsy, the male will see through it as a raccoon dog. This is because after mating, the male retreats, and as soon as the female gets up, she runs away.
According to Mr. Elgar, it is not only Aterigena aculeata females that cause sexual catalepsy. The current study found that females of Aterigena aculeata are likely to exhibit spontaneous sexual catalepsy, but it remains to be seen if the same is true for other species.
``It is not yet clear whether this has evolved as a mechanism for female selection, or as a mechanism for males to protect themselves from cannibalism,'' Elgar said.
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