Male spiders gift food in silk to mates

BERLIN: Male hunting spiders wrap food in their silk and offer these as gifts to prospective mates, a study has found.


Researchers from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in Germany conducted experiments on around 100 spiders ( Pisaura mirabilisi) to test whether the silk that male and female hunting spiders produce is an important part of mating, and if sex pheromones are always released.


The study, journal ‘Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology’, showed that males were attracted to the draglines that females produced. This suggests there are chemical cues attached to these silk draglines, and these likely serve as a form of female advertisement. Signalling through draglines may also be a way for females to supplement their own efforts to find food, because it lures would-be gift-carrying mates.