« It’s Christmas Eve, and you know what that means…

Gawain is a girl?

Today was the day I planned to start breeding my spiders. I have a group of definitely female black widows — they are easily recognizable, because they’re solid black spheres of voracious spiderhood.

Then I have another group set aside that I tentatively identified as male: they were smaller, had more slender abdomens, and just generally looked male. But their small size and slower growth meant they were still juveniles, and assigning sex was a bit more problematic. But they were growing fast, and I anticipated when I went into the lab today that at least some of them would be ready for mating.

I got a terrible surprise. Many of those males had died, unexpectedly. I suspect an epidemic of blue pedipalps, or that I’d waited too long and they died of unrequited love. I still have some vials with smaller presumptive males that I was afraid to offer to the females, because cannibalism, you know.

I had one large surviving male, I thought. Gawain. Gawain will come through for me and inseminate my females. Yes, Gawain would be the hero of the day! Except…

Gawain had become a girl.

Curse that campus-wide epidemic of infectious transgenderism!

She was actually almost certainly female all along, but had just matured enough that her sexual characteristics were inescapable. There go all my plans. She is quite pretty, though.

So now I have to be brave and maybe introduce some of the remaining diminutive males to the ladies, or I’m going to have to order some more black widows.

Sorry, the Christmas eve spider orgy has been cancelled.

« It’s Christmas Eve, and you know what that means…

Comments

  2. cartomancer says

    What if Guinevere and Gawain are lesbians, and would like nothing more than some hot girl-spider on girl-spider Sapphic action for Christmas?

    Admittedly my own attempts to secure lesbian fun times for animals in the past have been less than successful, but hope springs eternal. I’m pretty sure my cat is entirely asexual and despises other members of her species so much that sex isn’t even an option now. I’m beginning to feel that way about my own, truth be told.

  3. John Morales says

    Dunno about that. It seems to me to be more complicated than for mere mammals, this sex thing.

    https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/11/8/849
    ↓

    Abstract
    Spiders are an intriguing model to analyse sex chromosome evolution because of their peculiar multiple X chromosome systems. Y chromosomes were considered rare in this group, arising after neo-sex chromosome formation by X chromosome-autosome rearrangements. However, recent findings suggest that Y chromosomes are more common in spiders than previously thought. Besides neo-sex chromosomes, they are also involved in the ancient X1X2Y system of haplogyne spiders, whose origin is unknown. Furthermore, spiders seem to exhibit obligatorily one or two pairs of cryptic homomorphic XY chromosomes (further cryptic sex chromosome pairs, CSCPs), which could represent the ancestral spider sex chromosomes. Here, we analyse the molecular differentiation of particular types of spider Y chromosomes in a representative set of ten species by comparative genomic hybridisation (CGH). We found a high Y chromosome differentiation in haplogyne species with X1X2Y system except for Loxosceles spp. CSCP chromosomes exhibited generally low differentiation. Possible mechanisms and factors behind the observed patterns are discussed. The presence of autosomal regions marked predominantly or exclusively with the male or female probe was also recorded. We attribute this pattern to intraspecific variability in the copy number and distribution of certain repetitive DNAs in spider genomes, pointing thus to the limits of CGH in this arachnid group. In addition, we confirmed nonrandom association of chromosomes belonging to particular CSCPs at spermatogonial mitosis and spermatocyte meiosis and their association with multiple Xs throughout meiosis. Taken together, our data suggest diverse evolutionary pathways of molecular differentiation in different types of spider Y chromosomes.
    Keywords:
    achiasmatic pairing; Arthropoda; in situ hybridisation; karyotype evolution; male-specific region; neo-sex chromosome; repetitive DNA; Y chromosome; X1X2Y; X1X20

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    Merry Xmas.

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