Originally posted by sinjin Male spiders can loose, or even purposefully remove, their pedipalps during mating. Spider sex can be a real drag. See
this blog post by Chris Buddle for more gory details.
Wow, thanks for that link! It suggests that as the season progresses, more than 50% of males (of one particular species) might be missing pedipalps, with maybe 1/3 of those (or 17% of the male population) missing both! If this is the case, it's surprising that there aren't more pictures of spiders missing both pedipalps. (Either that or my Google-fu isn't as strong as it once was.) Also, the link allowed me to discover the work of a
whole research group working on arthropods right here at McGill University! (I'm a PhD candidate at McGill, working on a subject quite unrelated to spiders or macro photography.) So double-thanks!
And just because, here's a nice Phidippus I don't think I've put up in this thread, though it was previously posted in the
"Add your best K-01 photos here" thread.
Last edited by Doundounba; 06-18-2014 at 08:44 AM.