manlike spiders do n’t have a penis – all their sex is digital . After blunder out onto a bantam piece of music of webbing , a male sucks his spermatozoan into a bedroom at the bakshis of one of the short limb on his heading . Once he convinces a female to assume him , he ’ll crusade that appendage inside her venereal opening and ( hopefully ) make some babies .
The bedroom that stores sperm is part of a structure call the palpal pipe organ , which germinate from the chela that sit at the terminal of a wanderer leg . In some species of spider , the palpal organ is improbably luxuriant , with joints and socket that mesh with a female ’s genitals . But biologist had never find neuron inside them , or any evidence that they had sensory structures on these organs . They take that all spider had sexual activity that was free of sensation .
A new study published in Biology Letters todayshows that at least one spider can feel what he ’s doing . When Elisabeth Lipke and her co-worker at Ernst - Moritz - Arndt - University took a close look at the relatively simple and tubelike palpal organ in manly Tasmanian cave spiders , they found a group of neurons deep down .
Not just random neurons , either . Some were attached to the electronic organ ’s exoskeleton , the right way at the point where forces on the tip of the organ would stretch the cuticle . That intimate that these male can feel what ’s going on as they probe the female person during sexual activity . What ’s more , the scientist also found a previously unknown pair of glands inside the palpal organ : they propose that males might habituate these to modify their semen , reckon on what they feel inside the female .
[ Biology Letters ]
range fromLipke et al . 2015
get in touch with the generator at[email protected ] .
AnimalsNeurosciencesensesSpiders
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