HOW TO MAKE LOVE TO A CANNIBAL
R
ule number one: Never get eaten during foreplay.
Dear Dr. Tatiana,
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I'm a European praying mantis, and I've noticed I enjoy sex more if I bite my lovers' heads off first. It's because when I decapitate them they go into the most thrilling spasms. Somehow they seem less inhibited, more urgentâit's fabulous. Do you find this too?
Â
I Like 'Em Headless in Lisbon
Some of my best friends are man-eaters, but between you and me, cannibalism isn't my bag. I can see why you like it, though. Males of your species are boring lovers. Beheading them works wonders: whereas a headless chicken rushes wildly about, a headless mantis thrashes in a sexual frenzy. Why can't he be that way when he's whole? Well, it's hard to have wild sex if you're trying to keep your head.
A male praying mantis is in danger during his approach and his departure, but while he's actually on your backâthe position in which intact males have sexâyou cannot attack him. However, you do not need him intact to have sex with him. If you rip his head off on the approach, his body will go into spasms that allow his genitalia to connect with yours. Unsurprisingly, though, he does not want to have his head removed. Put yourself in his placeâyou'd be trembling to the tips of your antennae. If you so much as glimpsed a female, you'd freeze. And then you'd start to play grandmother's footsteps. Whenever she looked away, you'd creep closer. Whenever she turned toward you, you'd stand like a statueâno, no, don't look at me, I'm just a leafâfor hours if you had to. The aim? To get close enough to leap on her back. Once on her, you could make love unmolested. But a single false step, and you're at the pearly gates with your head tucked under your arm. In grandmother's footsteps, the stakes don't get higher than that.
Females in more than eighty other species have been caught eating their lovers before, during, or after sex. Spiders are the most common culprits, although several other mantises, some scorpions, and certain midges also number among the guilty. The midgesâtiny flies with big appetitesâdispatch their lovers in a particularly horrible way. The female captures her mate as she would any old prey and plunges her proboscis into his head while they link genitalia. Her spittle turns his innards to soup, which she slurps up, drinking until she's sucked him dry, then dropping his empty shell as casually as a child discards a dull toy. Only his manhood, which breaks off inside her, betrays the fact that this was no ordinary meal.
But perhaps there's an innocent explanation for this behavior. Perhaps it is a regrettable but genuine mistake. Or perhaps it is a rare psychosis brought on by life in captivity. After all, roughly a third of cannibal species have been seen at it only in the
laboratory: perhaps it happens because in a small cage the male can't run and can't hide. Perhaps. But the European praying mantis is one of the few species that has been watched in both the laboratory and the wildâand cannibalism is equally common in both places. The difference is that laboratory sex takes several hours longer, apparently because the male is too terrified to dismount. (Normally, when the male is done, he drops into the undergrowth, putting himself out of reach. Laboratories usually don't feature undergrowth, and the male stays where he is, as if pondering his predicament.) As for “I ate my lover by mistake”âwell, I can't say accidents never happen. But I know of several spiders where there can be no doubting the female's intention to take head, not give it. When she sees a male, she beckons him over and adopts a submissive, “I'm yours” postureâonly to pounce on him, wrap him up, and store him in her larder before he can say “cannibal.”
The trouble is, all too often the male is captured and eaten before he's had a chance to mate. From his point of view, this is a disaster. If he's eaten during foreplay, that's it: his genes get naturally deselected from the population. And from her point of view? The habit is not as self-defeating as you might think. For many of these creatures, a male represents a substantial meal. A female garden spider, for example, becomes noticeably plumper with each male she consumes. Her only risk is that she'll be so aggressive toward her suitors that she'll die as she livedâa grumpy old maid. But that risk is negligible.
To see why, let's step back and take a more general look at what happens when females routinely attempt to eat their lovers before sex. First, imagine a land where all the girls are equally rapacious. And imagine that each girl will meet just one boy in her whole life. If every girl eats her only suitor instead of screwing him, everyone loses: nobody reproduces and the population
goes extinct. However, what if some boys could somehow escape being eaten, at least until they had done the job? Any boy able to escape would have a huge advantage over those who were not. And if the trick to escaping had a genetic basis, genes for escaping would spread. After all, every male in the next generation would be the son of a successful escapeeâand thus females would be mated in spite of their rapacity.
Granted, in real life some girls may not be so fierce. This complicates matters. Girls who don't eat their mates are at no risk of remaining virgins, so if everyone has only one suitor, kinder, gentler females will win the day. This is because, with noncannibals in the population, a male lucky enough to meet one will be able to mate even if he doesn't have escaping genes. As a result, the advantage to being an escaper will be smaller, genes for escaping will spread more slowlyâand rapacious females will be more likely to encounter males that cannot elude them. Having eaten their only mate, rapacious females will leave no offspring, and genes for rapacity will disappear.
Now add another dollop of reality to the situation and consider what happens if each female is likely to meet lots of males. In this scenario, it won't matter to her if she eats most of them. Indeed, girls, it may count against you if you don't try to. That's because if everyone else is attempting to catch and eat their lovers, attempted cannibalism becomes a test. In a man-eating culture, your sons will survive and reproduce only if they can evade a female's clutches, so it would be wise to check their dads' abilities. At the same time, any male who can escape will again have a huge advantage over those who cannot, and genes for escaping will spread.
To sum up, the more likely females are to try and eat their mates, the larger the advantage in being an escapee and the faster the population will be made up of great escapers. In most situations, then, you should expect to see not cannibalism but escape.
But how does a male get close enough to copulate while avoiding capture? Grandmother's footsteps is one techniqueâbut that won't do if he has to tiptoe across a spiderweb, where every twang on the threads tells the owner where he is. Besides, while a male mantis can always crouch at the end of his partner's back, spider sex is more perilous. A male spider has two penises (called pedipalps), one on each side of his mouth. A female spider has two genital openings on the underside of her bellyâyou see the difficulty. It is impossible to have sex without getting up close and personal.
The most reliable way to escape unscathed is to disable her somehow. That's why male
Tetragnatha extensa
spiders are not afraid of sex: they have spurs on their fangs to wedge open the female's jaws so she can't bite during their embrace. The male crab spider
Xysticus cristatus
is a great lover: he goes for bondage, tying the female down (lucky her!) before making love. And in
Argyrodes zonatus,
a tiny silver spider that dwells on the webs of much bigger spiders, the males are nature's frat boys. On their heads they have a horn that secretes a powerful drug. They offer the horn to the female to suck so she'll get high and won't be able to resist their advances. Better hope she doesn't wake up with the munchies â¦
As for Mr. Praying Mantis, he's had a stroke of bad luck. When he's possessed of his head, his brain sends messages to his private parts telling him how to behave. This holds his libido in check until he's in position. When he loses his head, the messages that inhibit sexual behavior ceaseâand he turns into a sex fiend. The result is that he can copulate when there's almost nothing of him left. Yet although this sounds like proof that he has evolved a spectacular adaptation to being eaten, the “lose head, have sex” reflex is actually rather common among male insects. Something analogous even happens in humans: throttle a man and like as not
he'll get an erection, not from erotic pleasure in dying but because “Down, boy” signals from the brain stop coming. For most fellows, such a reflex is simply a medical curiosity. But most fellows don't have to face Ms. Mantis in the bedroom.
Dear Dr. Tatiana,
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I'm an Australian redback spider, and I'm a failure. I said to my darling, “Take, eat, this is my body,” and I vaulted into her jaws. But she spat me out and told me to get lost. Why did she spurn the ultimate sacrifice?
Â
Wretched in the Wilderness
What could be more perverse? A known man-eater refusing to eat a man who wishes to be eaten? Needless to say, your problem is unusual. But so are you. When faced with making love to a cannibal, most males do not try to make themselves more delicious.
In the first place, although being eaten after sex beats being eaten beforehand, most guys prefer not to be eaten at all. No surprises there: death puts a stop to amorous adventures. Anyone who has a good chance of mating again should hump and runâno whispering of sweet nothings, no postcoital cigarette. If anything, you should pummel her a little to stop her chasing you. In the scorpion
Paruroctonus mesaensis,
the male whacks his partner several times before racing off; in the wolf spider
Lycosa rabida,
the male tosses his lover in the air, leaving her in a crumpled heap as he hurries away.
But what if you haven't a hope of mating again? This would be the case if, for example, you were only capable of mating once, or if your life expectancy were short, or if a quest for another female
were sure to fail. Then, as long as you've accomplished your mission, you shouldn't fuss if your lover eats you. The male spider
Argiope aemula
vigorously resists capture before he's had sexâbut the excitement is usually too much for him, and he expires
in copula.
It's fine with him if she opts for gastronomic burial. In the bristle worm
Nereis caudata,
something similar goes on but for once it's the man who eats his wife. These worms, which look like bottlebrushes, live in sand and mud on the seafloor. Once the female has laid her eggs, the male puts them into a long tube that he makes, and fertilizes them. He tends the eggs, like a dragon guarding treasure, until they have hatched and the larvae are ready to go out into the world. Shortly after the female lays her eggs, she gives up the ghost. If her mate decides, as he sometimes does, to hasten her end by having her for lunch, so be it. It's all the same to her.
Do other males eat their mates? I have never heard of it. But note: this is not to say males don't eat females. They do. Just not during sex. Platonic cannibalism is a problem for creatures from apes to amoebae. It's depraved out there. The sand shark, for example, practices intrauterine cannibalism. That's right, the biggest fetus gobbles up its embryonic brothers and sisters while they are in the womb. Surely you know the rhyme:
The shark, he is a vicious beast,
Tears fin from fin at every feast.
But it's no surprise he should do soâ
He ate his sibs
in utero.
The reason platonic cannibalism is so much more common than the sexual kind is simple. Cannibalism is risky: your intended victim may, at any moment, capture you. Most cannibals, therefore, are cowards and never pick on someone their own size. In a
typical cannibalistic society, adults eat children, big children eat small children, and small children eat eggs. Even among amoebae, cannibals are giants. So you see, cannibalism between adultsâof any kind, sexual or notâis rare.
Moreover, for most males, it makes no sense to eat their mates: they'd lose the eggs they've struggled to fertilize. That's why the male paddle crab
Ovalipes catharus
is a gentleman. In this species, everybody eats everybody, with one caveat: you are at risk only while molting. That's because the Coward's Rule holds: molting crabs can't defend themselves. For several days they have neither a shell that can withstand blows nor claws that can deliver them.
Unfortunately, however, as is common for crabs, female paddle crabs must mate while molting. This leaves them vulnerable to cannibalistic attack. But help is on the way. On meeting a female who's about to molt, a male picks her up and carries her until she's gone soft. He then makes love to her ever so slowlyâsomeâtimes taking several days over itâand protects her from males with less honorable intentions until she's hardened again and can look after herself. This gallantry is hardly selfless, however. By fending off crabs who might eat her, he also fends off males who might ravage her and thus raises the odds he'll be the only dad for her current batch of children. It's quite a prize: large females carry more than 250,000 eggs per batch.