Name: Why Do Only Females Eat Their Mates?
Uploaded: 2025-12-06T21:01:20.000Z
Duration: 3 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In the middle of baby-making, a female praying mantis will sometimes chomp down on a male's head,

then devour him as she finishes mating with him.

Many different species lunch on their lovers, but one thing is remarkably consistent.

It's almost always the females doing the eating.

Why is it dudes that always end up as dinner?

All sorts of critters will occasionally munch on members of their own species.

But here, we're talking specifically about when an animal eats its mate, or potential mate,

before, during or right after baby-making, which scientists call sexual cannibalism.

Since females are the sex that lays the eggs or nurtures the offspring inside their own bodies,

if a male eats a female before, during or right after mating, there won't be any babies.

So any male who regularly dined on his dates wouldn't be able to pass along the habit.

It can really only be females that make a habit of lunching on their love.

Like killing off a baby daddy that otherwise would have helped raise the babies.

But in species where males don't help out, the female gets left alone to raise the babies.

Sometimes a lot of babies, which takes a lot of energy.

So if a convenient protein-packed snack is like right there, it benefits her big time to chow down.

One study found that mantis females that ate their mates laid more than twice as many eggs as those that didn't.

Which might make it seem like mate-eating helps both female and male mantises leave behind a bigger genetic legacy.

But since the male ends up dead, his future prospects are over.

If he hadn't been eaten, he could have gone on to mate again and again,

In some cases though, getting eaten does seem to benefit males.

After redback spiders mate, the male often somersaults into the female's fangs,

Scientists think this self-sacrifice evolved because in this species,

the vast majority of males get eaten by predators before they ever get a chance to mate.

So if a male redback does get lucky enough to actually get lucky,

he's almost certainly not going to get another chance.

He might as well sacrifice himself to his mate to make sure the babies are well provided for.

So we've covered why males get eaten during and after baby-making.

But what's up with eating a potential partner before mating?

Which guarantees exactly zero offspring from the para.

Well, in certain species, like fishing spiders, competition is intense,

so it really pays for females to be super aggressive.

And all that innate aggression can accidentally end up directed toward a potential mate.

The bottom line is that while it seems totally unthinkable to us,

sometimes it does make sense for females to plate their dates.

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