A Biologist Stumbles Upon Wolf Spiders In Love (Three Of Them) | Spider Control Tucson
A couple of years ago during the fall season a man named Matthew Persons was searching his back yard for spiders. Persons eventually found not one, not two, but three dreaded wolf spiders, and he saw the three spiders indulging in an activity that he never would have expected to witness that day. In case you cannot guess, the three wolf spiders were copulating.
To make the above statement clear it must be repeated that the reproductive act was not between two spiders, rather the act included three different spiders of unknown sex. Persons was certainly surprised by what he had witnessed, but he just forgot about it, and, carried on with his day with no images of spider fornication on his mind, presumably.
The very next day Persons returned to his backyard of arthropod sin, and miraculously, Persons witnessed another sexual act between three spiders. Shortly after witnessing the second instance of spider romance, he could not believe his eyes when he witnessed yet another scene showing sexual activity between three wolf spiders.
Although I have never witnessed a similar sight, I am not even sure if I would know what the spiders were doing. To me, a non-entomologist, I would not have noticed anything except for a mess of twenty four legs. So In case you are wondering, Persons, unlike me, possessed the knowledge to recognize spiders as indulging in the reproductive act because he is a trained biologist and ecologist.
After Persons witnessed the third instance of three wolf spiders copulating, he could not believe the coincidence, so he decided to capture them and record their reproductive actions for a period of four hours, for science of course. Little did Persons know at the time, but he had just documented the first ever known case of two male wolf spiders and one female wolf spider copulating.
Given that this incident was the first documented instance of two male wolf spiders and one female wolf spider copulating as a threesome, it is even more amazing that he witnessed the arachnid love fest on three different occasions in a small block of time. I would be curious to know how Persons explained to others how he discovered these instances of unconventional arachnid fornication.
Have you ever witnessed a group of spiders that looked to be working together, but you could not put your finger on the intended goal of the spiders activity?
