Male Spiders Eat Out Females In Order to Stay Alive

For male spiders, sex often ends with something really unpleasant: Death. Fortunately for at least one species of nope, the males have figured out how they might remain alive to scare the shit out of us another day — they eat out the female spider in order to prevent their own untimely demise.

According to New Scientist, the Darwin bark spider’s sex life has been a relative secret until now. Scientists in Slovenia, however, intent on removing the last ounce of privacy the spiders have, spent several weeks studying our eight-legged friends in Madagascar and have found that, hey, these spiders actually do some cool and progressive shit.

There are two ways that adult male Darwin’s bark spiders can avoid being eaten after sex. First, they can mate only with young and inexperienced female spiders who are like really bad at the whole mating thing, or they can subdue the adult female spiders with a bit or oral pleasuring in order to continue living their lives relatively unharmed.

From New Scientist:

“Males nibble on female external genitals using their fangs, and then we observed that there was a liquid coming out of the fangs. We do not know what this liquid is, but it looks like digestive juices, which they usually secrete when eating,” says [Simona] Kralj-Fiser, who presented the study at the Ethological Society’s “Causes and consequences of social behaviour” conference in Hamburg, Germany, last week.

Kralj-Fiser suggests the oral lubrication relaxes adult females so they are less likely to engage in sexual cannibalism – which would explain why the males don’t make such an effort with the younger females that are unable to eat them.

Smart! So smart, in fact, that the Darwin’s bark spiders may take the “coolest monster” title away from the spiders that twerk. But the real winners here are the scientists who can, for the rest of their lives, tell friends, relatives and potential romantic partners that they’ve spent two weeks in Madagascar watching spiders fuck.