This desert-dwelling spider is officially mom of the year.
Once her babies are hatched, Stegodyphus lineatus feeds herself to them. We wish were kidding.
Her babies need her from day one, unlike the majority of other arachnids. The tiny 8-legged creatures are initially completely helpless and require their mother to guide them out of their silk egg sacs. The doting mother then feeds them regularly for two weeks by regurgitating all of the liquid food in her belly. In the meantime, enzymes are slowly eating away at her body in preparation for her death.
When approximately two weeks have passed, the young “reward her efforts by killing and completely consuming her, leaving an empty exoskeleton,” according to an article in Entomology Today.
The horror!
While this suicidal maternal strategy may seem grotesque, this method seems to work well for the species. Because the mother lays only one clutch in her entire lifetime, the babies are extremely well cared for and the majority survive.
The process, termed matriphagy or “mother-eating”, was first discovered by German arachnologist Ernst Kullman in the 1970s. Other spiders also depend on this system, as do a variety of insects, scorpions and nematode worms.
PhD student Justin Ma noted a similar strategy in crab spiders: “The mothers provide their spiderlings with unfertilized ‘nurse’ eggs to eat. The young eat the eggs and also, slowly, their mother. Over the course of weeks, she is eaten away until she falls immobile and is consumed entirely.”
Sometimes it’s good to be human.
WATCH NEXT: Australian Redback Spider Eats Snake
