Sex and Survival: The Bizarre Mating Games of Spiders

Spider Neobrettus courtship behaviour

Spider Neobrettus courtship behaviour is rather complex where the male injects the sperm from the pedipalp into the female’s genital structure, which is a hardened plate on the underside of the abdomen. The surprising part is, the female allowed the male even when she was gardening her own egg sac. Maybe the female mates several times with the same male or mates with several different males for better sperm competition. Or males limit the mating either by inserting parts of their genitalia into the female's reproductive organs, or by using mating plugs which come from the males' seminal fluid.

The incident baffled me until the research report published on ‘Hurricanes drive the evolution of more aggressive spiders’ by researchers at McMaster University. The analysis suggested that after a tropical cyclone event, colonies with more aggressive foraging responses produced more egg cases and had more spiderlings survive into early winter. The trend was consistent across multiple storms that varied in size, duration and intensity, suggesting the effects are robust evolutionary responses.

I hope I got my answer about the reason behind such behavior. During the month of April, it was the Norwesters or the Kalbaishakhi with violent thunderstorms that happened within 48 hours and I reached the most affected area to document insect behaviour as usual practice on the weekend and first witnessed such amazing behaviour which lasted just above a minute.

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