Sexual cannibalism is associated with female behavioural type, hunger state and increased hatching success

Precopulatory sexual cannibalism may represent the most extreme form of sexual conflict because it necessarily truncates the reproductive potential of the victim. Three of the most prominent mechanisms invoked to explain incidence of precopulatory sexual cannibalism are the ‘adaptive foraging’, ‘aggressive spillover’ and ‘mate choice’ hypotheses. These hypotheses argue that sexual cannibalism is either (1) the result of female choice, where females gauge the benefits of suitors as perspective mates versus prey, (2) a neutral (or deleterious) by-product of selection on aggressiveness in nonreproductive contexts, or (3) a mechanism by which females express their mating preferences, respectively. We tested the predictions of these hypotheses in the funnel-web spider Agelenopsis pennsylvanica using staged laboratory encounters. We then tracked numerous fitness proxies of cannibalistic versus noncannibalistic females to determine whether cannibalism was associated with increased female performance. We found that more aggressive females and those deprived of food were more likely to engage in precopulatory cannibalism. Cannibalism was not associated with male condition, male body size or female body size, nor with the mass of females' egg cases, the number of eggs therein, or the mass of individual eggs. In contrast, there was a positive association between the mass of the egg case and the number of offspring that emerged in cannibalistic females, but not in noncannibalistic females. Thus, offspring of cannibalistic mothers appear to have increased hatching success in heavier egg cases. This may represent a novel advantage associated with sexual cannibalism.

► Precopulatory cannibalism in funnel-web spiders was associated with female behavioural type and hunger state.
► More aggressive females and those deprived of food were more likely to cannibalize their first mate.
► Sexual cannibalism was not associated with female body mass, egg case mass, number of eggs or singleton egg mass.
► Egg case mass and number of offspring were positively correlated in cannibalistic females.
► Sexual cannibalism was associated with improved hatching performance.