Mom of the Year? Mother Spider Feeds Self to Babies

[tencats]

The insect world may have found its Mom of the Year in the female Stegodyphus lineatus, a desert spider that feeds herself to her young shortly after they’re hatched. “Matriphagy was first discovered by the German arachnologist Ernst Kullmann in seventies, so the behaviors of regurgitation and matriphagy are not the new discovery here,”
Found in the semi-arid regions of Israel and other parts of the Mediterranean basin as well as throughout the Near East and Asia Minor, the female Stegodyphus spins her webs in shrubbery. Webs studied in Salomon’s research were found in bushes near dried-up river beds in Israel’s Negev Desert.

Inside the web, she creates a silk disc that contains 70 to 80 eggs, while her intestinal tissues begin to dissolve. When the “spiderlings” hatch, she pierces the silk disc, allowing the babies to emerge.

Note, dear readers, those of you with weak stomachs may want to stop reading at this point.

http://news.discovery.com/animals/insects/mom-of-the-year-mother-spider-feeds-self-to-babies-150508.htm

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Interesting, but what was more amusing was a link on that page to a story on fish using

'water tongues' to eat things on land, sort of spitting up a mouthful of water onto things, then sucking the water (plus the food) back in to their mouths. Why is that amusing? Because it's a story about evolution on a Fox News website, so of course the comments underneath are all a bunch of evolution deniers. Makes you wonder who at Fox decided to actually run that story.