This morning was supposed to be hot sexy breeding time: I had set aside ten very large, pulchritudinous, eager virgin females in special containers where they could build a cozy little silky nest, and then I had a larger pool of smaller young’uns to draw some lucky males from. I went through that pool first thing, and what do I find? Only two males. Everyone else is female.
This is thanks to the fact that males are generally smaller, weaker, and less robust, and there’s been slow attrition of the population over the last month or two that selectively weeds out males. This is not good. This is going to be a bit of a bottleneck. I’ve got 24 eager females and only two males to service them.
I guess what I’m going to do is pair up the males with a different female every day, rotating them through a harem. Unfortunately, this harem is hungry and out-muscles their partners by quite a bit, so it might be more like a gauntlet, and those two males are going to end up at best exhausted, and at worst, dead.
I also have one egg sac that will hatch out by the end of the month, but it will take another 4-6 weeks beyond that before any males will be ready to get to work. These females are ripe, can they wait that long?
“Woke” spiders feminizing the population. Someone tell Tucker!
Death by Snu-Snu.
I should check out thumb-nail before posting.
Do you have any backup experiments planned? I suspect you will have 2 males, make that one male, wait, oh no, no males pretty quickly. But they died happy!
But tastier to the females, am I right?
#4: Not a big worry — this species will tolerate their partners for a long time.
Backup experiment: if I get desperate, I’ll go out and look for males in the wild, that is, in people’s houses.
If you can’t find suitable spiders, there is always Australia…