FOR some spiders, love means waiting a little longer than usual before eating
your sexual partner.
Many female spiders make a meal of their mates. But when Mark Elgar and his
colleagues at the University of Melbourne offered pairs of males to female
Argiope keyserlingi spiders, they found that the females allowed smaller
males to copulate for longer before they devoured them (Proceedings of the
Royal Society B, vol 267, p 2439).
This means the smaller males have a better chance of fathering offspring. But
why females prefer small males remains a mystery.
