How spiders do a lover’s leap ...to avoid being a mate’s meal

FOR male spiders, the prospect of being eaten after sex makes a quick getaway essential.

Now experts have found they can catapult away from a female at 88 centimetres (35 inches) per second. Scientists calculated the jaw-dropping speed in male orb-weaving spiders, which can jump 100 times their own body length.

The post-coital leap to freedom has never been seen before in nature. When a team from Hubei University in China watched 155 spiders mating, the three males which failed to escape were killed and eaten. The ones who escaped bent their legs against their mate’s body during copulation, like coiled springs, before leaping away. But the study, published in the journal Current Biology, showed females tend to get both a good father and a good dinner.

Lead author Dr Shichang Zhang said males mate ‘over and over again until they are usually exhausted and killed by the female anyway’.