I had a bit of a spider infection last time home. 4 months after the last spray I came home to find my roof covered in webs and 1-2 large sized black house spiders happily perched in plain view in pretty much every room.
After a vicious battle in which i pitted my wits, newspaper and the WMD known as fly spray I managed to kill most of the interior invaders. However, I got a professional to sort out the outside of the house.
I did manage to find one redback in the garage, she was happily perched on his web, with a dead black house spider nicely gift wrapped behind her.
So I was looking at photos of her today and comparing her to other red backs on the web, she does look somewhat different, but I’m guessing most of the photos on the web [pun sooooo intended.. take that!] are from the eastern states.
I did learn that redback spiders are one of the few who are suicidal in their mating rituals.
For Redback spiders, mating begins innocently enough, with the male courting the female by plucking on the strands of her web, producing a vibration which has been translated into sound in this recording. But the male is also courting death: as the two spiders mate, the female will slowly consume her partner. So does he try and escape? Hardly. Instead the male spider somersaults his body into position directly over the female’s mouth, as if to say ‘digest me, I’m yours!’
It’s amazing to watch because its clear that the female is not doing anything to force the male to do this, rather the male is doing this sort of sacrificial somersault all by himself. The fangs of the female then sink into the male and she begins to extrude digestive enzymes and basically begins to eat the male while he’s copulating with her.”
Maydianne Andrade is a graduate student at Cornell University
One would wonder with the current rate of divorce if humans are that different.
