Some female spiders have a reputation of eating their mates after copulation.
Male Philoponella prominens orb weaver spiders are the kangaroos of the arachnid world.
The researchers capturedvideo of the catapulting actionthat shows the males' quick getaway method.
They observed 155 successful matings with 152 ending in a catapult to freedom.
The three that didn’t catapult became dinner.
To test the observations, the researchers prevented 30 males from catapulting away.
Those males also became dinner.
“Females may use this behavior to judge the quality of a male during mating,” Zhang said.
