Males mate with multiple females to increase offspring numbers in a nursery web spider

Alissa G Anderson, Eileen A Hebets, Bridget M Bickner and J Colton Watts

Behavioral Ecology, 2018, vol. 29, issue 4, 918-924

Abstract: Male spiders wrap female’s legs in silk before mating to increase their likelihood of surviving a female’s cannibalistic attack. We demonstrate that surviving such an attack allows males to acquire future matings. Mating with multiple females in the laboratory increased males’ offspring production. Using demographic data, we constructed a mathematical model that suggests that males have the opportunity to mate with multiple partners in our population given that female encounter rates are sufficiently high.

Keywords: mating systems; polygyny; sexual conflict; sexual selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/ary054 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:29:y:2018:i:4:p:918-924.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().