Spontaneous male death during copulation in an orb-weaving spider
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Males of some cannibalistic species of spiders and insects appear to sacrifice themselves by allowing the female to eat them, and the adaptive significance of such drastic terminal reproductive investment has recently been demonstrated for a spider. Typically, the female has to kill the male, but it has been suggested that males of some species in the cannibalistic orb-weaving spider genus Argiope may die in copula without female 'collaboration'. Here, we provide the first experimental evidence to our knowledge of programmed sudden death after onset of copulation in males of the spider Argiope aurantia. Our observations reveal that males invariably die during the insertion of their second pedipalp, regardless of whether they mate with newly moulted, defenceless females or with older mature females that often attack them. We determined experimentally that the death of males is triggered immediately upon insertion of the second palp, when males become unresponsive, and heartbeat ceases within minutes of insertion. We discuss the possible adaptive significance of programmed death during copulation, and argue that male death has evolved in a context other than sexual cannibalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".