Just Cause I Thought This Was Hilarious — For Multiple Reasons

From Steven Jay Gould’s The Flamingo’s Smile:

A hungry female black widow spider is also a formidable eating machine, and courting males must exercise great circumspection. On entering a female’s web, the male taps and tweaks some of her silk lines. If the female charges. the male either beats a hasty retreat or sails quickly away on his own gossamer. If the female does not respond, the male approaches slowly and cautiously, cutting the female’s web at several strategic points, thereby reducing her routes of escape or attack. The male often throws several lines of silk about lhe female, called, inevitably I suppose, the “bridal veil.” They are not strong. and the larger female could surely break them. but she generally does not. And copulation, as they like to say in the technical literature, “then ensues.” The male, blessed with paired organs for transferring sperm, inserts one palp, then, if not yet attacked by the female, the other. Hungry females may then gobble up their mates, completing the double-entendre of a consummation devoutly to be wished.