By Susan Milius
Videotapes of yellow garden spiders show that if a female doesn’t murder her mate, he’ll expire during sex anyway.
“As far as we know, it’s the first time anyone has shown males spontaneously dying during copulation,” says Daphne J. Fairbairn of the University of California, Riverside. She’s not talking about the odd heart attack among romancing fellows. Among males of the yellow garden spider, “all of them do it,” she says.