
Nephila pilipes, Lily Beach, Christmas Island.
For all the popularity of web-slinging heroes, spiders continue to suffer scorn and aghast. Many who cross paths with the arachnids refuse to appreciate their intriguing beauty, much less acknowledge a mutual alliance against hexapods the latter are always happy to honour. Fear and loathing, rather, greet spiders unfortunate enough to encounter the average stroller who craves nature in the form of shorn lawns and sterile fields.

Yet, widespread appall and a religious bent for appeasing unreasonable gods by spraying a fog of death at every patch of urban green have failed to eradicate the city’s wilder fringes from webs that span gaps in the shrubbery. With seasonal regularity, the sprawling orbs of each new cycle of Nephilas begin as modest constructs with a zone of buffers that probably shield the primary trap from insects large enough to blunder through the silk of a young spider. With invisible speed, juveniles who outflank predatory wasps and web-savvy birds develop into monsters that hunt in broad daylight. The most common local species is a creature with gold flecks and spots on the ventral side of the opistosoma and the joints of her legs, a pattern thought to strike a dynamic equilibrium between attracting flying pollinators and even fiercer predators.
Observers who overcome the disgust of their childhood conditioning would usually spot specks of orange littering the orb-webs of large Nephilas. Some of these eight-legged droplets will prove to be members of a thieving tribe. But a few will reveal the lankier proportions of males, each wielding a pair of sperm-laden palps. The puny spidermen are often too high up for close inspection or dwell in webs that never tire of swaying to mocking winds, but on a recent walk from Noordin Beach at Pulau Ubin we found a number of webs by the road that harboured near-adult females and an entourage of suitors who probably sip from the same sup as their landlady while they await her final moult into sexual maturity.

Brandishing two fistfuls of baby batter, male nephilids often wage a war of proxy within the epigyne of their mates, with each individual attempting to, literally, seal his fatherhood by breaking off a rigid portion of the palp called the embolus while the organ is inserted into the female’s sperm duct. One species, Argiope aurantia, takes a strict view of la petite mort by dying shortly after he has penetrated her ovular depths to become a cadaveric block to other cocks. A couple of other genera, Herennia and Nephilengys, simply severe the entire palpal bulb, accepting self-castration as the price of paternity, their broken-off parts serving to hinder the entry of later lovers.

The genus Nephila, save the basal fenestrata which boasts large, effective palpal plugs, make do with slim emboli that do a poor job of preventing sloppy seconds. This development, along with the vast sexual dimorphism of Nephilas, is a possible result of an arms race in deep time whereby males try to monopolise their mates while the ladies seek the thrill of multiple trysts. It’s a habit that should add to the mental arsenal of a populace who looks askance at female choice and fails to recognise the true nature of things beyond faith in material gains and blinkered morality.
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