The other day, by pure chance, I witnessed a very intimate act between two consenting adults that gave me a new appreciation of the capacity for passion and gentleness among – do I have your attention? – among invertebrates.
This is what happened: I was preparing to clean one of our walk-out basement windows when I noticed a rather messy cellar-spider web in its upper right corner. Cellar spiders are pale, long-legged arachnids, often confused with so-called Daddy-Long-Legs, which are arachnids, but not spiders. Anyhow, despite their name, I have found cellar spiders throughout the house.
In this case there was a light-gray female spider hanging limp in the sheets of her loose web. She was approached cautiously by a male, smaller and darker than the female, who reached out and tentatively touched the female with his long, feeler-like front legs. At first I thought the female might be dead, so unresponsive and motionless did she remain to his proddings. I wondered if the male was going to eat her – praying mantises not being the only arthropods that engage in cannibalism. In fact, he began jabbing at her abdomen, at first slowly and not urgently, and then harder and more fiercely, as though tearing away parts of her stomach. Still there was no response from her, which made it seem even more likely that she was dead.
The male pulled away from her for a moment, and I saw his enlarged pedipalps. Pedipalps are small, leg-like structures near the spider’s jaws. In mature males, the tips of the pedipalps are dark, barbed, and enlarged, and are used by the male to convey sperm to the female’s epigynum, or external genital structures. What I was watching, in fact, is the common form of spider mating.
Then he struck again, and again pulled back, this time holding on to her abdomen with his leg tips, so that her whole body was drawn towards him, and the web with her, like a hair about to be plucked. He held on this way, under tension, for ten or fifteen seconds, during which, surprisingly, the female at last began to move. She reached out slowly and seemed to gently caress the male on the side with her long front leg, several times.
Finally, he let go, and the web sprung back into place. Once again she hung there, languid and motionless, while the male stepped back a few paces and appeared to be cleaning off his pedipalps by drawing them through his mandibles, or mouth parts.
After another half-minute or so, he advanced towards her again, and they each reached out with a foreleg, she with her right one, he with his left, touching and overlapping them as lovers might reach out and clasp hands across a table. Then they separated and he crawled off somewhere to die.
