It has long been general knowledge that the female Black Widow spider (Micaria sociabilis) eats her mate after sex – that is, after all, how she got her name – but now there is a scientific study showing that males are just as likely to eat females.
A team at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic studied how different pairings of the spiders interacted in a lab, making sure the creatures were well-fed to rule out hunger-driven cannibalism. They found, among other things, that size and age both matter – the typically larger males from the summer generation often eating older spring generation females. What's more, not even virginity or big body size, often considered signs of mating quality for spiders, could save the older females from male cannibalization.
Unlike the females, who are said to eat less-than-satisfactory partners after mating, cannibalistic males tended to eat the females at first contact, before they ever mated. That seems to me to indicate that the female Black Widow is the more intelligent of the two; at least she is getting a meal and getting laid.
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