Male spiders catapult away!

Washington: Sometimes there are pretty valid reasons for leaving right after s.x. A team of Chinese scientists has discovered that male orb-weaving spiders fling themselves away from their partners -- pulling 20 Gs of acceleration in order to avoid being killed and eaten.

The mechanism, described for the first time in the journal Current Biology on Monday, involves the spiders’ first pair of legs to immediately undertake a split-second catapult action. Lead author Shichang Zhang of Hubei University in Wuhan told AFP he was "excited" to make the discovery, which required high-speed, high-resolution cameras to detect. Zhang and colleagues were studying sexual selection in this spider, "Philoponella prominens," which live in communal groups of up to 300 individuals.