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The one who didn't get away. A male Nephilengys malabarensis
snapped off his genitals (red box) in the female, but it was eaten anyway.
I suppose it's better to snap off your genitals rather than be devoured by your partner after mating, but it's not that much better. Here's a solution that the male orb-weaver spider Nephilengys malabarensis developed to increase its chance of survival after mating with a cannibalistic female:
Daiqin Li at the National University of Singapore and his colleagues studied the species and found that after the male breaks away his severed organ continues to pump sperm into the female. This allows him to fertilize her remotely, while denying entry to other males. Even though the male cannot regrow his genitals and so renders himself sterile, he increases the odds that he will father the offspring of his one and only mate. [...]
Li thinks that this bizarre strategy, found in only two spider families so far, evolved to counter the female’s penchant for cannibalism. “The females are very aggressive and 75% of them kill the males during sex,” he explains. “The duration of copulation is also very short, and the females initiate the break-off.”
Previously on Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits
As repugnant as cannibalism is to our modern sensibilities, most of us could forgive instances where there was no murder involved, and the only alternative would be to starve to death. Read about five such cases in this post.
Perhaps the most famous act of cannibalism in recent history took place in the mountains of Chile during the winter of 1972. Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 was carrying 45 passengers, including members of a rugby team and their families, when it crashed high in the Andes. Of the twenty-nine who survived the crash, eight died in an avalanche, leaving the remaining survivors with a whole heap of frozen meat and a difficult moral decision to make.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
After that gosh-darn-they’re-so-cute post about animal moms taking care of their babies, posted from the Upcoming Queue by smellslikepurple, I think Neatorama needs to provide a badly needed counterbalance.
So, with the help of National Geographic, here’s Mother’s Day Mayhem: 5 "Worst" Animal Moms. Take, for instance, the burying beetle mom:
She’s a "bad" mom because … she eats her young in a deadly game of musical chairs.
Burying beetle larvae typically move into a mouse carcass their mother and father have buried. The mother feeds her young by eating the carcass and regurgitating the mouse meat.
"The little larvae wave back and forth, begging to mom," said Scott Forbes, University of Winnipeg biologist and author of A Natural History of Families.
"The first ones get fed, but the very last one sitting there begging [after the portion runs out] gets eaten by the mother."
Give Mom a break, because … burying beetle mothers are likely culling their brood to match the food supply. The beetles typically produce broods bigger than the carcass can support. A bit of strategic cannibalism boosts overall survival chances for the larvae left "standing" when the music stops.
Link (Photo: Gary Meszaros/Visuals Unlimited)
Some frogs are content to swallow a Christmas light, whereas others opt for a larger fare. Check out this green-stripe frog that took a bite out of a smaller green tree frog, as captured by wildlife fan Kerry Roberts in the garden of her home:
She said she heard a frog squealing and assumed that a snake had got into her garden was was eating one of the hundreds of amphibians that live near her house.
Kerry continued: "I was having coffee at about 6.30 in the morning when I heard some squealing and splashing in my pool – like a frog in distress.
"My first thought was ‘oh no, it’s a snake, how am I going to get rid of it?’. But when I went over for a closer to look I saw it was a frog trying to eat another one."
Link (Photo: Kerry Roberts)
