100 YEARS OLD AND STILL TALKING TO SPIDERS...

THE plot so far: Beachcomber is intrigued by a paper in Animal Behaviour journal which reports that females of a jumping spider species show no preference between grey males and tufted males, despite the fact that grey males have striped legs, yellow pedipalps (second legs) and orange spots on their abdomens while tufted males have black bodies, white legs and three tufts above their middle front eyes. Beachcomber decided to ask a female spider about all this. Now read on:

I secured the services of a female jumping spider by offering her a juicy fly then asked her why she was so indiscriminate in her mating choices.

“Who told you that?” she said indignantly. “I won’t mate with anyone, you know. Compared with some of the other girls, we jumping spiders are quite demure.”

“Oh I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to offend. It’s just that researchers from Zurich and Michigan say their experiments show that you’re just as likely to mate with a grey male as a tufted one. Furthermore, they say that you seem to choose lightweight greys and heavier tufted. Why is that?”

“Oh I’d have thought that was obvious,” she said. “Just take a look at the fat grey guys with their stripey legs. They look ridiculous. The stripes are horizontal too, which makes them look even fatter. At least with vertical stripes they’d look taller, which would make them seem less fat. With white legs, you can get away with being a bit overweight, but not stripes. Don’t these guys care how they look?”

“That makes sense,” I said, “but what about their courtship behaviour? They say the grey ones don’t initiate courtship until they are 3cm away while the tufted start when 9cm away.”

“That’s part of the same thing,” she said. “Don’t these fat grey chaps know that they look smaller when they’re further away. Instead they wait until they’re right next to us when the fat ones look even worse.”

“On a more general note,” I asked, “do you think, as the researchers hope, that their work could, as they put it, ‘contribute to the evolution of reproductive isolation and sympatric speciation by sexual selection’?”

“I dunno about that,” she said, “but I must say I didn’t think much of their killing four females, spraying them with acrylic coating and putting them in lifelike postures to see what the males did. Frankly, I’d jump a mile if I was approached by a male who showed interest in a dead female who’d been sprayed with acrylic paint, even if she was in a lifelike posture.

“And the fact that they made video recordings of the interactions only makes matters worse. I don’t know who watches necrophiliac arachnoporn, but I’m amazed that your researchers are making the stuff.

“They also showed their misogynistic credentials in housing us individually ‘to avoid cannibalism’ as they put it. Females eat males after mating, you know, not the other way round. Stopping cannibalism is anti-feminist. Must go now. I’m having a boyfriend for dinner.” She jumped off and that was the last I heard from her.