Novel male trait prolongs survival in suicidal mating
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Male redback spiders (Latrodectus hasselti) maximize paternity if they copulate twice with their cannibalistic mate. Facilitating cannibalistic attack during their first copulation yields paternity benefits. However, females have paired sperm-storage organs inseminated during two separate copulations, so males that succumb to partial cannibalism during the first copulation lose at least 50% of their paternity to rivals. In this paper, we describe a novel male trait--an abdominal constriction that appears during courtship--that allows males to survive and mate with females for a second time, despite the substantial cannibalistic damage inflicted during the first copulation. Constricted males that were wounded to simulate early cannibalism had higher endurance, greater survivorship, longer subsequent courtship and higher mating success than wounded males that were not constricted. Constriction was not found in a non-sacrificial congener that rarely survived simulated cannibalism, and the protective effect of constriction in redbacks was specific to the type of damage inflicted by females during the first copulation. Thus, the abdominal constriction allows males to overcome the potential fitness limit imposed by their own suicidal strategy-paradoxically, by prolonging survival across two cannibalistic copulations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 teacher head, 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".