Evolutionary Biology

Andrade's article was fascinating! She explained a theory behind cannibalism as a favored sexual selection trait in male redback spiders. Andrade provided two main points that support sexual cannibalism: increased paternity and decreased likelihood of female remating. Males that were cannibalized spent a median of 25 minutes in copulation while males that survived spent 11 minutes in copulation. As longer copulations resulted in the transfer of more sperm, the males that were cannibalized by nonvirgin females resulted in a twofold increase in their median paternity compared with the males that survived copulation. In addition, male mating with virgin females also ...