Our 8-legged friends have a reputation for being ruthless even with their loved ones - female spider can eat the groom even before they start to introduce themselves. So, when a male spider “gets to know” the female spider it is not a conventional date with low light and wine, music playing softly with a quiet rumbling noises of the restaurant. None of that. Males simply give food to their females - flies that they recently caught in their webs. And while females are eating the males are onto their sexy business. But as fast as they may be, females are eating faster.
So some inventive male spiders wrap their food for the female to unwrap it. It buys them time. It reminds Valentine gift, isn't it?
But there are some super-bright spiders who replace the food with... bits of wood or small objects making more of a decoy than a food. It does the trick for the "lady" and there is no need to bother to catch flies anymore. It kind of looks romantic ... Even with the unwrapping of the gift the date is pretty short. Once the male did his business – he is out of there. Fast. He is not particularly keen to be munched up by the female.
So there it is. Love or not, present or not: it certainly looks like a sort of a Valentine's gift!
Posted by
Olga Bogatyreva
Dr. O. Bogatyreva is a broadly qualified expert in the fields of creativity, innovation and advanced design, inventive problem solving. Her main interests are creative problem-solving techniques, psychology of invention, and teaching methods for different cultural environments.
Olga runs training courses in creativity, invention and bio-inspired design worldwide, consulting European Space Agency, UK Ministry of Defence and many other large companies. She also developed unique online course on creative problem-solving for industry with the original educational videos initially ordered by the University of Bath (UK).
Being Internationally certified expert in TRIZ (powerful technique for systematic invention process) Olga sold two patents on laboratory equipment, which was designed, manufactured, tested and widely used.
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