Corinnomma (Mating)

It was a completely unexpected surprise. What am I talking about? Well, it is about seeing and digitally capturing the mating ritual between a male and female spider from the genus Corinnomma in the family Corinnidae. This post is on what I witnessed.

I was on one of my weekend nature walks at the nearby lake. As I scanned for creatures, I noticed a spider in one of the fence rings. Bending down I saw it was a spider from the genus Corinnomma. From the looks it was a female. Here is a picture of it:

I noticed some movement at the far side; something waving its legs. Looking from the top of the ring, it turned out to be a male spider from the same genus.

The usual behaviour that I had seen exhibited previously was that the male spider would go away on its way. But this time it was different. The male continued to “probe” around from that spot. You can see it above and with a few legs of the female showing below:

The male moved back away from the edge. I then noticed that it did not have one of its hind legs.

I now got a chance to take a head on photo.

Bored with me it went back to probing from the edge of the fence ring.

Now I knew it was going to turn interesting. What was it trying to do, I wondered. Well I decided to observe from below instead. The male started to approach the female slowly.

And then it dawned on me; it was trying to mate with the female!

You can see from the above photo that the female is bigger than the male. The male had to be careful. Female spiders can eat males! The male continued its legs waving and “feeling” the female from a distance. I guess it was trying to gauge the mood of the female as well as “cozy” up to it.

After feeling good about the situation it got above the female:

And it finally made its move to mate with her! Here is what I captured of it doing it the second time:

And it would go back away a bit before coming back.

The male eventually went away after a couple of times of mating. It was too risky to hang around lest the female got hungry after all the action.

Video

The male had to do quite a bit of “work” to get the female ready or sense if she was ready to let him approach her. Check out the below video to see all the action:

Interested in seeing an adult female from this genus? Check out my post here. To see a male, check this one out.

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