Meet Five Cannibal Animals that Eat Their Mates

VIVA – Like humans, animals also need partners to breed or fulfill their needs. However, what if there are animals that eat their own mates to survive? If so, what are they?

In the animal world, mating can indeed lead to death due to fighting between males. In addition, a more surprising fact is that cannibalism in animals can happen such that they kill their mates and then eat them.

This is mostly done by female animals because they need a lot of energy to give birth to children and get energy. Well, here are five cannibal animals that eat their mates.

1. Praying Mantis

An insect that displays sexual cannibalism is the mantis, although not all species practice it. Compared with male mantises, females are much bigger and stronger, and this makes it easy to capture their prey. Females send out a chemical signal of pheromones to attract males.

When the male attempts to mate with the female, it is prone to be attacked. Even if the male mantis is decapitated by the female, the male is still able to mate, as nerves in its abdomen control the body. Giving birth takes a lot of energy from the female, as she may lay about 100 eggs.

Therefore, eating the male gives the female the required nutrition to birth its offspring. Some species of mantis can reproduce asexually in a process called parthenogenesis, and eating the male can fuel this process.

2. Scorpion

Scorpion is one of the cannibal animals that that might eat their mates. The mother invests a great amount of time and energy in her offspring, birthing as many as 100 in a single brood.

Unlike most nonmammalian animals, scorpions are viviparous, giving birth to live young instead of laying eggs. This takes even more energy. Because of this, males that remain near females after mating are sometimes killed and eaten, which provides sustenance to the female. As a last resort, scorpion mothers may even eat their offspring to survive.

3. Green Anaconda

Green anacondas have a very interesting mating strategy that might end with one or more males being eaten. Female green anacondas are polyandrous and therefore will mate with multiple males. This is done in what is called a “breeding ball,” where sometimes more than 10 males gather on a female and compete with each other to find the cloaca so they can mate.

Breeding balls may last up to four weeks, by which time the female has most likely mated with many males. As is a trend in this list, female green anacondas are bigger and stronger than males. They have a long gestation period during which their movement is severely limited.

Therefore, by eating one or more of the males after mating, they gain the nutrients they need to successfully birth their offspring.

4. Jumping Spider

In choosing a mate, the male must impress the female with dance moves. The male will jump up and down and wave his limbs around. At the same time, the male also creates a song by banging his body parts together. The song is quite amazing for humans to hear, as it tends to have different beats and verses.

If the female is impressed, she will mate with the male. But if not, the male will be eaten by the female.

5. Octopus

The octopus is known for its intelligence, but did you know that certain species are also cannibalistic? Males have a specially modified arm, called a hectocotylus, that is used to inject sperm packets into the female. When the males are done, the female octopus often eats the male.

Many species of male octopus die soon after mating anyway, so why not? Female octopuses protect their eggs and often die upon giving birth. Octopus cannibalism is not limited to just mating, however, as it is not uncommon for hatchlings to eat each other.