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Does a male ever really present himself to be eaten? In fact, such complicity is blatantly displayed in Australian redback spider mating, wherein the male grabs the female and somersaults directly into her mouthparts (move this up to the non compliance section). Without halting his acrobatics, the redback transfers his sperm into female storage organs by inserting one or both emboli into her (Andrade 1996). As a result, 65% of redback mating interactions end in sexual cannibalism (Andrade 2003). The male Australian redback’s biomass is miniscule, so his sacrifice has no apparent impact on the female spider’s reproductive output.
In an attempt to develop an adaptionist description of sexual cannibalism, several researchers have devised mathematical cost-benefit models that address both the foraging strategy hypothesis and observations of redback self-sacrifice.
Based on these parameters, the adaptive value of cannibalism for males can be mathematically modeled ( [link] ). This theoretical graph shows the relationship of A/P to C for different values ENC. For organism X, C=0.5 and A/P=2.5, and ENC=4. That is, if a male has a 50% chance of being cannibalized and can produce 2.5 times more offspring by being cannibalized than not, then self-sacrifice is advantageous until the male’s expected number of lifetime matings exceeds four (in other words, until being cannibalized causes him to forgo three or more matings). The graph suggests that, as the number of expected matings increases, male self-sacrifice must greatly enhance his mate’s fecundity in order to offset his cost of neglecting future mates (Buskirk et al. 1984).
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