Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoid being eaten

Well, when you're going up against "cannibalistic femininity", it seems less toxic...

More like a solid prenup, hey?

It's a dual injection sex drive.

Venomous masculinity

also check out the book Children of Time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)). Reading it now (not sure how I missed it originally), pretty good evolutionary world building based on this species :)

> The conspicuous main eyes provide vision more acute than a cat's during the day

Curious how the spider processes all this information with their tiny brain ...

Why is it eight-legged creatures doing this what’s going on

You are thinking Sharks. They may even eat the female by accident.

For this octopus, it is more like making a prenuptial agreement, or gifting assets to family, or a public limited company.

No. There's no concept of rape among animals.

The female protects the eggs on her own and then invariably dies, so there's not a lot of reason to invest in a relationship.

With preying mantis and black widow it seemed, as their names suggest, very common for the female to eat the male after being boinked. However, it turns out that in the lab setting with a small closed environment, probably lots of lights and weird sounds, the female was freaked out, which led to her getting the first meal she could find, that being the male. In the wild, it does happen but as a last resort if food is scarce.

The orb spider figured out a hack: he ejects his member in to her after sex which keeps inseminating her from that point forward. Sure he dies, but he reproduces from beyond the grave!

It's important to say that evolution isn't versioned, and what we're observing isn't finished. We may be looking at an evolutionary dead-end. Which is to say that if eating the male is an evolutionary development, it might a poor one.

There is no logic to evolution. No decisions are being made. Evolution is reactive, and the surviving lineages may only be responding effectively to some of the external forces. Evolution doesn't happen at a species level, it happens at the individual level and has downstream effects on the species.

We're seeing evolution in action. Tragically, we (individually) won't be around long enough to observe the changes in another 100 or 200 or 1000 generations.

> either the male is dead before he finish reproducing with the female or at least, he is not able to reproduce with other females

In addition to the sibling comment's caveats, it's worth mentioning that the latter might actually be an advantage? If the male is able to continue reproducing with an unbounded number of females, and the females are limited by how often they can lay eggs (or how quickly they can after copulation), a mutation that causes females to prevent males from reproducing with other females could potentially drown out the ability of females without those mutations to reproduce (e.g. if those females were able to copulate with most males first, they'd be the only ones to produce offspring, and there could even be other adaptions or mutations that aid them in the "first to copulate" race).

Eggs are way more resource-intensive than sperm. The female octopus will take care of the eggs and protect them, and then die after they hatch.

Both parents are all-in, probably because some less malleable trait or characteristic, whether environmental or hereditary, requires them to be so.

Presumably the female acquires calories with which to grow her brood.

"Unable to reproduce with other females" is probably relevant. The relative size of different genders has a lot to do with if a species is polygamous or monogamous. Larger males the former and larger females the latter.

The effect of natural selection is that the genes that propagate most are the ones that maximize the probability of that gene appearing future generations. There is no direct evolutionary pressure for an individual to behave in ways that benefit the species in general.

Maybe the female can use the proteins for her offspring, and there are more offspring to offset the lost male.

Game theory.

The female benefits from a meal.

The male benefits via procreation.

A different choice by either party would be suboptimal.

The plural of octopus is octopuses.

But if you want to sound more latin, octopus is a third declension noun, and those have nominative plurals that tend to end in -es, rather than the second declension which ends in -us for singular or -i for plural. Third declension nouns whose nominative form ends in -s also tend to change their root's final consonant when you change the suffix. (Eg. opus -> opera. That one doesn't end in -es because it's neuter.)

All this to say, the latin plural of octopus is octopodes.

We'd go extinct. Spiders can have hundreds of offspring per 'birth.' Humans have, on average, about one. You need each woman to have at least 2 children for populations to stay the same. Which, in this case would mean you'd need at least 2 men.

An evolution (or artificial 'population management') where males are 66% likely or otherwise born at a 2:1 ratio wouldn't work because then you need each woman to have 3 children to create a sustainable population, meaning you need an even higher ratio of males - and so on recursively towards infinite male:female ratios.

No need to wonder, you can already observe the results going on at the moment.

Women don't do outright cannibalism since humans are more sophisticated, but women absolutely kill (figuratively) their mate/husband to extract as much ressource as possible (regardless of them having offspring in needs or not).

They are biologically programmed for that, but we forgot about it and/or we like to pretend this is not happening.

Reality doesn't care much about feeling, and with little countermeasures afforded to the men, birthrate has been going down tremendously in every country where women power has been unmatched.

So, the answer is actually pretty simple: it will die down until the only ones left are the males that found a new "venom" and are willing to use it.

You mean if a woman could destroy a man for (not) having sex? Men would avoid sex, cohabitation, marriage and families. For society it would mean less babies, demographic and economical decline.

It's not worth wondering. A core tenant of evolution is that it's a random mutation, and that some random mutation is favorable. It's very Life of Pi, you have to make your own truth out of this because it won't make sense.

If? never been married, right? PS. You may think of your credit card as your "venom", so you won't get eat alive in a divorce process lol