In a process scientists call web reduction, he bunches it into a little ball and wraps it up with his own silk. Once the male arrives at her silken abode, he starts to wreck it, systematically disassembling her web one strand at a time. The male black widow spider prevents other males from mating with a female by reducing the size of her web. The scent tells the whole story of her mating history and even includes her hunger level. The male can detect this scent from 200 feet away, a long distance when you’re the size of a grain of rice. “Kind of like a chemical personal ad,” Scott said. Females set up their webs, stay put and wait.įemale black widows use pheromone-laced silk to attract males. “Male black widows have their own web,” said Scott, “but after their final molt, they abandon it and search for females.”ĭuring peak mating season, thousands of males will prowl around looking for females. It turns out the males are far from innocent bystanders, according to Scott. Scott is conducting a research project to illuminate the antics of the male black widow, the neglected character in the mating drama. When advancing on a female in her web, a male black widow must create the right vibrations with his abdomen that tell her, “I’m here to mate, not be food.” How he approaches her could mean the difference between life and death. “If the male enters the female’s web and she’s really hungry, she might be more interested in her next meal than mating,” Scott said. If the western black widow does eat the male, Scott said, it’s because she mistakes him for food. A male black widow spider prepares to mate with a female. In both of these species, he offers himself to her, somersaulting into her mouth after copulation. Most species of widow spider (there are 31), including the western black widow found in the U.S., don’t kill their mates at all. Only two widow spider species always eat their mate - the Australian redback and the brown widow, an invasive species in California.Īnd the male seems to be asking for it. “I think the black widow’s reputation is totally undeserved,” said Catherine Scott, an arachnologist at the University of Toronto who has researched black widows for years. One bite could kill you. With a shiny black color and a glaring red hourglass stomach, she has long inspired fear and awe.īut it turns out, scientists say, much of that is overblown. Her venom is 15 times stronger than a rattlesnake’s. Black widow spiders build their webs at night. That’s when they start to build their tangled webs, he said, which they’ll live in their whole lives. “Black widows start coming out around twilight when it’s not completely dark,” said Rick Vetter, a retired scientist at UC Riverside who has studied the spider for 40 years. These are the longest nights of the year, which is good news for nocturnal animals like the black widow spider, which prefers to slink around in the darkness, hiding in obscure places like inside pipes and under porches.
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