Comments

  1. blf says

    Poopyhead, How similar (or not) are Mr & Mrs Spider in size (or, perhaps, mass?)? The reason I ask is because over at Spidermentor, there was a short discussion about why females chowed down on males (see link). One hypothesis was:

    “Creepy Cannibalism: Why Female Spiders Eat Mates”, claims there is a direct correlation to size difference. The larger the female (relative to the male), the more likely the male is eaten: “It’s all about size. If males are small, they’re easier to catch and therefore more likely to be prey, say Shawn Wilder and Ann Rypstra from Miami University in Ohio. Big females eat their puny mates simply because a) they’re hungry and b) they can.” (2008) https://www.livescience.com/7555-creepy-cannibalism-female-spiders-eat-mates.html

    There are other hypothesis, which are not mutually exclusive.

    (I’m not sure if having no scalebars is an improvement on unlabelled scalebars…)

  2. says

    Distinctly smaller. If we crowded the males and females together, the females would definitely go raging cannibal. In the larger cages, it’s not much of a problem anymore.

  3. christoph says

    ” She hasn’t tried to eat him even once.”

    Yet. She’ll get to it, be patient.

  4. says

    Hey PZ, that video of a woman pushing a priest off the stage after he supposedly said “Fat women don’t go to heaven”? Turns out to be fake news. She did push him off the stage but he was giving a perfectly ordinary sermon about faith. The woman is mentally ill, and her actual motive is unknown.

  5. =8)-DX says

    @cervantes #4 the priest is also an outspoken homophobe afaik, but that pretty much goes without saying in the RCC.