The huge, cannibalistic female is only a small part of the body. This tiny male web spider faces a major challenge in finding a mate. If he wants to avoid being captured and eaten by the partner he wants, he must carefully enter her net and approach silently. Not only that, he was also forced to compete with other male spiders on the delicate stage of the spider web, and every step he took could be fatal.

A research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior and the Weizmann Institute of Science has been trying to understand the temporal and spatial dynamics that characterize these complex mating strategies for nearly a decade.

Research co-author Alex Jordan, an evolutionary biologist at Max Planck, said: "Our initial concept was to explore the behavior of these spiders moving on the web like electrons orbiting the nucleus or planets orbiting a star. Although the precise physics that explains the motion of spiders is ultimately different from atoms or parallel lines of the universe, these metaphors have proved very useful. 

"Imagine an electron orbiting an atomic nucleus or a massive star in space. It is so big that it generates its own gravitational field and pulls in the surrounding objects-you can think about this huge, free-standing star in the same way. The female who killed each other," Jordan explained. "Now imagine that smaller planets, moons or comets approach this attraction-these are our small but brave males." 

Just as a cosmic collision evaporates an asteroid captured by a large stellar force field, male spiders approach the female too quickly or risk becoming prey from the wrong angle. 

"Working in the tropical rain forests of Panama, I have repeatedly seen over-enthusiastic males fall prey to cannibalistic females, especially when they go the wrong way or approach the females too quickly," the co-author of the study West Sylvia Garza said. Master's student of Max Planck.

The relationship between competing men can also be explained by cosmic metaphors. Just as smaller planets have their own gravity, males will initially approach each other and attract each other, but as they get closer, the attraction turns into repulsion, and they end up in open battle.

All these fascinating choreography do not require advanced wisdom. Instead, the surface of the web acts as a conduit for the physical vibrations that spiders use to communicate and balance risks and rewards. The effective physical forces that men and women experience on the elastic surface of the net can help them solve complex tasks that would otherwise require more complex cognitive machines.

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Author: Earth.com Special Writer Andrei Ionescu