half angel, half shellfish

i’ve really been wanting to write about spider sex

like, the ones where the male offers a nuptial gift before mating (lotsa species do this), but this time those fuckers fuckin lie about it

“Males pacify females, which are notoriously prone to cannibalism, with the gift of a fly wrapped in silk. The larger the fly, the longer it will take to unwrap and eat, extending the opportunity to copulate before her hunger turns to aggression. So, there is a premium on males who are good hunters, though deceitful suitors sometimes wrap and present small twig fragments, risking death mid-copulation when she uncovers the fraudulent offering.”

- Phil Gates re Pisaura mirabilis

yeah, the dude’s gifts are sometimes bullshit (and who doesn’t have that ex), but really ESH

“Females usually control mating duration and they often attempt to run away with the gift upon terminating the copulation… if the female moves and attempts to terminate copulation, the male may perform “thanatosis” which is a “death feigning” behaviour (with stretched-out legs) unique to this species. The male ends the insertion and grasp the gift with his chelicerae. The female moves away while holding the nuptial gift and the male is dragged along until the female stops. Subsequently he “revives” and resumes mating. Thanatosis functions as a mating effort that increases the male’s chances of completing or prolonging the copulation. Silk wrapping facilitates male handling and control over the gift, as it facilitates a stronger hold of the silk covered package, both with the chelicerae and the feet claws, compared to an unwrapped insect. As a result, females are less likely to succeed in stealing a wrapped than an unwrapped gift”

- Worthless donations: male deception and female counter play in a nuptial gift-giving spider

so she’s trying to run away with the prize (as well as, uh, the prize?), while he’s wrapping up dogshit in shiny paper and bows, and also the wrapping makes it easier for him to play dead and hold onto the nuptial gift so she can’t steal it

but really, remember, she’s “notoriously prone to cannibalism” (the spider, not Charlotte) (oh wait do we think the spider in Charlotte’s Web1 was named after Goethe’s Werther’s love interest? (man Werther should’ve tried offering her a protein-enriched fly gift instead of reading her his translation of Ossian, whoops))

the male P. mirabilis spider playing dead in order to prolong copulation thing is pretty funny to me - I’m just more used to female dragonflies faking death in order to avoid sex instead. which, frankly, super understandable - “The first step in the mating process is for the male dragonfly to subdue the female… [he] grabs hold of her thorax with his legs, and sometimes bites her… he uses his anal appendages (cerci) to hold her by the neck while continuing to fly with her in a formation referred to as tandem linkage.”

(The penis is located at the tip of the male’s abdominal segment, while the female’s genital opening is located near her neck. <3 IDIC, iykyk)

Dalí described Maruja Mallo2 as “mitad ángel, mitad marisco” - “half angel, half shellfish”

some of her work reminds me of Tamara de Lempicka - I think it’s that sulky stern mouth

especially combined with those stylized blonde curls

Mallo led me somehow to also discovering the wonderfully creepy Remedios Varo

that’s some proto-internet-cryptid nightmare shit right there, love it

not sure why, but all this somehow also reminds me of Lou Andreas-Salomé, here seen driving a cart pulled by Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée

(maybe the path my brain went on?: Mallo → Lempicka (as explained above) → Ayn Rand (L’s art was used as cover art for the British editions) → Nietzsche → oh yeah there was a forgotten underrated woman (Lou Andreas-Salomé) in his life too

short stories I recently read and enjoyed

• All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury (I was reminded of this old fav via Kevin Kodama and it still chokes me up)

• The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes by Margaret St. Clair (via Short Story Club)

• An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce (another good old classic worth the occasional remembering)