Some Spiders Savor Sacrificial Somersault Sex

Imagine you are a horny male redback spider. You might be a small guy—a fraction of her size—but unlike some, you don't have a complex about it. You're just happy to be there, "there" meaning the haphazard snarl of a web of a female redback spider. Only 20 percent of male redback spiders ever mate, so you're already feeling lucky. You know that the climax of your life has arrived, meaning your climax. You approach the spider and insert into her one of your two pedipalps, a pair of leg-like appendages that dangle by your mouth and hold your sperm. Then, as is custom, you initiate a parkour sequence. After doing a headstand, you flip yourself on your back, landing your body between the female's fangs. There, your palp still inside her, she begins to chew on you. If you survive this—which you often do thanks to your ability to squeeze your waist really small so her fangs can't immediately impale you—you two take a break. Then you're back in action, inserting your second palp in her and sliding cleanly into headstand number two, followed by that somersault, followed by more chewing. This time you let her finish you off, meaning eat you entirely. But you don't have a complex around this either. You have completed the work of your life, ensuring that the batches of eggs she will soon lay are all fathered by you, who, at this point, have departed this mortal coil, digested and excreted by your large and lovely mate. "This is the mating ritual of L. hasselti," Kardelen Özgün Uludağ, a PhD student at the University of Hamburg in Germany, wrote in an email. If this for some reason is hard to imagine, perhaps the following video will help.

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