Some spiders care for their females together.
From wolf-spider of the family Lycosidae personal life takes place in the usual spider scenario: the male, trying to seduce the female, makes her different signs, if the female is not impressed, she’s likely the male will be eaten.
Wolf spider Rabidosa punctulata, male. (Photo: Bryan Reynolds / Flickr.com.)
Two males – one female. (Photo: Matthew Persons.)”
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But imagine if an alien mating ritual noticed another male that he was hurt to join the courtship, especially if the courtship is successful? Such Dating Threesome between spiders wolves Rabidosa punctulata observed in my garden Matthew Parsons (Matthew Persons), Professor of biology and ecology of the Susquehanna University. Documenting in detail what is happening, he wrote on the basis of their observations article that should soon appear in the Journal of Arachnology .
According to Matthew Persons, only one courtship is not limited – arthropods so three of us went over to mate. For females there are no inconveniences: genitals she paired for each of the two males. For the gentleman who, so to speak, joined, the advantages are also obvious: for it is the ability to leave offspring, to minimize the chances of being eaten.
But the one who started the mating ritual, too, benefits from this situation: if he has an assistant, the brunt of appeasement females can be divided into two, and some even shift further perform the ritual on the “changer”. On the other hand, spiders can be noticed by the predator, and then additional partner can work with a sentinel, which in time will notice the danger – especially if the other is obsessed with a ritual and no longer even notice anything around him. Finally, such cooperation eliminates the males from a showdown with each other.
However, when it came to mating, problems were inevitable. Those males who were observed by the researcher tried to prevent each other to enter the seminal fluid in the reproductive tract of the female, yourself made the mistake of trying to inseminate another male, began to fight, which they had to interrupt the pairing and start again. (Seminal fluid male spiders hold a special organ on pedipalp – that is, the second pair of limbs, and during mating they have to manipulate pedipalpi to seminal fluid reproductive tract of the female.) All this greatly delayed the process when the mating ritual of spiders-Volkov lasts from 25 minutes to a half hour, then Dating three time was a lot more (one spider trio spent mating as much as four hours).
Hours-long mating ritual dangerous, first, the fact that the group a very long time copulating spiders are likely to attract the attention of a predator, and secondly, the female might get hungry and forget what they’re actually doing. But, once the males still go on a date the three of us, so in some such cases, the advantages outweigh the risk.
According to LiveScience.
