Talk:Sexual cannibalism

Summaries of this article appear in cannibalism (zoology) and non-human animal sexual behavior.

A fact from Sexual cannibalism appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 18 January 2007. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that male spiders, scorpions and mantids have special strategies to avoid sexual cannibalism?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2007/January.

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GOOD ARTICLE

Very good article! 41.204.106.25 (talk) 06:20, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Isopods

This behaviour is not strictly limited to females eating males. Some species of marine parasite exhibit the reverse behaviour [1]202.151.29.124 01:27, 13 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I added material relating to "Cannibalism within mating pairs of the parasitic isopod Ichthyoxenus fushanensis". --House of Scandal 06:58, 1 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm aware that certain isopods and crustaceans, and certain spiders where females normally eat males, have been known to have instances of males eating females. While it does happen, it is never the absolute or general norm of an entire species, whereas in the case of the female eating the male, there are a fair minority of species where that is the norm. In one species, Tenodera sinensis, up to 80% of any given female's diet consists of the males of her own species. While that is an extreme case, much of the rest of the Family Mantidae is such that the female usually (or even always in some species) eats the male after mating. In the Genus Latrodectus, she fairly often or usually eats him, depending on the exact species. -The Mysterious El Willstro 209.183.187.144 (talk) 20:23, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Stuff in the article presents the opposite of what is mentioned in the cited source

"Evidence for male complicity in their own cannibalism is anecdotal and has not been borne out by experimental and behavioral research. "

That was a section of article, allegedly supported by the following source:

"Despite demonstrable male complicity in A. aemula and L. hasselti, and the adaptive significance of sexual cannibalism in L. hasselti, it is unlikely that adaptive male complicity represents a general model for the evolution of sexual cannibalism, because of the prevalence of premating sexual cannibalism."

Emphasis added, because the phrase "demonstrable male complicity" is a strong contradiction to what this wiki page says. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.73.32.46 (talk) 04:09, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reverse Sexual Cannibalism : Discrepancy between source and conclusion

This wiki page suggests that males eating females during mating is always abnormal :

"On rare occasion, these roles are reversed.[1][2] While there are some species in which sexual cannibalism is normal, the aforementioned reversal of roles is abnormal in all."

But source [2] ( http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1651/C-2343 ) seems to suggest that with Ichthyoxenus fushanensis both male-eating-female and female-eating-male are practised without being abnormal (The abstract is short and quick to read for confirmation) :

" Rather, both types of cannibalism may be regarded as the result of competition between paired individuals"

Otherwise its a very interesting article (sufficiently interesting for me to notice a difference between it and the source), thankyou.

- Anony-mouse, 21:48, 21 Sep 2010 (GMT) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.26.8.56 (talk)

"Since sexual cannibalism occurs in multiple species across different taxa, it is evident that there must be some evolutionary benefit to it."

Many oddities occurs within species that pose no evolutionary benefit. What is the function of male-pattern baldness? It's just there, because of some mutation that never threatened the survival of our species; and thus was never ousted from the DNA pool. As far as some species are concerned, it's probably just as insignificant to devour their males during reproduction. 70.153.124.225 (talk) 05:26, 27 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The key part of the sentence is the prepositional phrase "across different taxa." Can you name something other than humans that also has pattern baldness? The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 05:29, 10 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, male chimpanzees often go bald. But, I would strongly argue against the idea that male pattern baldness has no evolutionary benefit to humans. For one, it allows easy identification of sex and maturity from a distance, which can also communicate information about the stability, strength, and health of a group of which the male is a member. Some current fashion trends may be against obvious pattern baldness in human males, but that hardly says much about our history as a species. --68.222.51.87 (talk) 06:46, 14 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I vote this is removed also. Ad Hoc evolutionary theories give the science a bad name. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.195.129.111 (talk) 18:45, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Fine, 68.222.51.87, chimps can also have pattern baldness. I should point out, since you refer to it as "male pattern baldness," that it is technically not exclusively male, but it's much rarer in females because it's recessive in them but dominant in us. (It's a sex-influenced autosomal trait.) At least, that's true in humans, and I'm not sure off-hand about chimps. Furthermore, it should be noted that the Genera Pan (chimps) and Homo (humans) are both in the Family Hominidae. Black widows and praying mantises, however, both of which exhibit sexual cannibalism, are in different taxa at Family-level, namely in the Families Theridiidae and Mantidae, respectively. The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 05:22, 1 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Reword lead paragraph

Sexual cannibalism is a special case of cannibalism in which a female kills and consumes a male of the same species before, during, or after copulation. I was just wondering how a female could kill and consume a male before copulation. If the male has been killed and consumed how can copulation occur after this event? In invertibrates I can imagine part of the male being eaten first then copulation then death caused by the initial wound? Even this said I think rewording could be good, the first sentence still stands out as being not posible. Carlwev (talk) 05:51, 22 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Me and SarahH04 are considering expanding out the material on mate guarding for our university project Shannonf94 (talk) 16:25, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Whole article plagiarism

There is plagiarism in this article. A lot of content is copy pasted from http://ib.berkeley.edu/courses/ib160/past_papers/suttle.html.

I suggest a strict reedition of the article or the original authors will be warned. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.201.138.156 (talk • contribs)

Pinging Diannaa about the copyright matter. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 18:46, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I have checked the article using the copyvio detection tool and found no overlap in the current version. I also checked manually for close paraphrasing issues and found nothing egregious. However, previous versions do have considerable overlap. I have revision-deleted some of the old revisions. The copyvio material was removed/re-written by an IP editor back in April 2011. The copyvio content was added by User:Boston, who has not edited since 2009. Thanks for reporting. — Diannaa (talk) 19:14, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your assistance, Diannaa. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 19:17, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Insects

I've noticed while making some recent changes to this article that it mentions sexual cannibalism being prevalent across many orders of insects yet the only insect mentioned in this article is the praying mantis. And the fact that the praying mantis is the only example given in this article also adds more confusion, because does that mean either most insects or insects which are primarily carnivorous? Because I doubt herbivorous insects such as butterflies or weevils would engage in sexual cannibalism (I can understand animals such as arachnids and crustaceans, as the former is primarily carnivorous while the former is omnivorous, but there are many herbivorous insects around). Definitely something which needs more clarification in this article later on and perhaps there should be a few more examples of insect species/orders mentioned here alongside the praying mantis. Broman178 (talk) 12:20, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]