eli5- Why do insects and arachnids like a praying mantis and spiders kill the one they mate with?
In: 499
Food. The ones that killed had mated and now got themselves a small cache of food too…and they did better than the ones who did not kill their mate.
So eating the mate became a thing.
Note that, at least in the case of praying mantises, they do not *necessarily* kill their mate.
What happens is that *in captivity* they tend to do so, also sometimes in the wild. It’s thought that underfed or starving females do eat the males, but there may be other stresses in laboratory conditions.
We just assumed that behavior happened in the wild too (it can, but not consistently), because even scientists are subject to human flaws.
They don’t, they do only under duress, which includes being picked up and observed by humans.
This is a behavior only seen in captivity, in the wild, The male just leaves afterwards. It’s a solo creature defending territory, not a sexually motivated killing
The real answer is we don’t- and can’t- know *why* anything is the way it is in nature (barring things we have done to nature that has a motive behind it)
All we know is that nothing about that situation has had an effect on breeding strong enough for the species to fail at continuing on.
We’re pretty sure that insects don’t have internal monologs like we do, spending time debating choices and weighing consequences, so there might just not be a ‘why’ as much as a ‘how likely this action is over the other possible actions’.
That’s pretty unsatisfying, I know, but you might as well start getting used it it – “we don’t really know why” is the answer to almost every question that doesn’t involve a person you can ask for a motive.
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