Unidan, AKA Ben Eisenkop, is an ecosystem ecologist who first rose to fame (infamy?) on Reddit by popping up in posts across the site, answering any queries and concepts pertaining to biology and ecology. Eisenkop is a columnist for Upvoted, where he spotlights a new creature every week.

Sexual cannibalism. These are the terms that make a person like myself affirm their belief that they’re in the right field of study. While it may seem like the tagline to a 1970s exploitation horror movie, sexual cannibalism is a very real behavior for some animals. In today’s “Bizarre Beasts,” we’re going to look at the Pisaurina mira species, a nursery web spider, which has evolved a very unique behavior on top of one that already turns heads.

For many spiders, having sex and reproducing is bad news for the male.

Once the male and female copulate, the female often gobbles up the male on the spot. Why? Well, there’s quite a few potential explanations! Some biologists suggest that female aggression is very high in spiders, and it’s the cost of doing business in her web. Others suggest that the meal is somewhat “sacrificial” in that the nutritional value of the male is his last contribution towards the success of his offspring. Some suggest a variety of contributing factors. There are even some smaller male spiders that are consumed before even getting to copulate, viewed as sort of an “appetizer” before a worthy, fit, larger male comes along to mate.

Here’s a video of how mating typically goes for your average spider, courtesy of National Geographic:

Regardless of the reason, if you’re a male spider, living after sex can be a good thing—you can survive to produce more offspring, or, well, you know, enjoy the fineries of life: hordes of children, the pitter-patter of innumerable feet in your web, and watching your children be devoured by mates of their own.

Ah, life.

Enter Pisaurina mira, recently studied at the University of Nebraska in last month’s issue of Biology Letters, who uses a kinky strategy to avoid being eaten after sex. During the act, males will wrestle with the female and use their silk to tie her up, leaving her struggling with her bonds during copulation while the male makes a hasty escape. This behavior is advantageous to males, the researchers surmised, as it allows for future matings for the male!

The researchers tested the idea of higher male survivorship for those who practice silk bondage by selectively blocking some males’ spinnerets and not others. I’m sure those spiders had a nice spider-panic-attack as they attempted to produce their restraints and came up empty. Sorry, spiderbros, it’s all in the name of science.

You can watch a video of the experiment in action courtesy of the University of Nebraska researchers here: