Some male spiders tie females together before mating so as not to be eaten

By Joshua Rapp Learning

A female Thanatus Fabricii spider

Ondrej Michalek

Some male spiders skip the games or courtship dances during mating and choose to attack instead.

“Spiders sometimes spend hours luring women to court them, but these guys just go and bite,” says Lenka Sentenská of the University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada.

Running crab spiders, a group of more than 600 species, are widespread in Europe, Asia, and Africa. While working at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, Sentenská studied the behavior of a species native to Israel – Thanatus Fabricii, in April 2019. She made it happen …