'Change gifts for sex' in insects

The male Nursery-Web spider (belonging to the family Pisaura mirabilis) prepares silk-wrapped gifts carefully to give the spider what they like. Most of the gifts contain insects inside, but some gift packages are only for 'cheating'.

The new study, published in BioMed Central, said that the gift the male spider gave to the spider could be a fly, or something of no value, such as a cotton ball, dried flower, or the rest. of prey, or an empty gift. The size of all gifts is almost the same, so what is the difficult spider to guess inside the gift package?

Males give gifts to their offspring more often than those who only like to eat. However, the mating time that female spiders give to the male 'guys' gives gifts worth less to the 'guys' who give kind gifts, and even shorter to those 'guys' who donate nothing.

It seems that both female and male spiders know how to evaluate the value of the gift, thereby adjusting their behavior. While the spider ends the mating time with the gifted male spiders sooner, the male spider pretends to die when the female wants to finish the mating process to 'run' with the gift, especially when that gift is not worth it at all. Children and males sometimes fight to fight for edible gifts, but they never conflict because of worthless gifts.

Maria Albo, the leader of the study, explained: 'The evolution of males helps them to consider the benefits and the price to pay. Males have to find and pack gifts, but this cost is very small if males give worthless gifts . " The benefit of giving good gifts is that they are mated longer , meaning they are much freed. However, females are wise enough to identify 'trick' gifts and soon terminate the process of mating with those 'scams'.