Sacrificed Mother: Meet the Spider Who Offers Her Body of Food for Her Young

In the arid and warm southwest of Africa, lives a creature that breaks with many of the most common stereotypes about spiders. It is Stegodyphus dumicola, a species that not only lives in cooperative communities, but also takes motherhood to an amazing end: females voluntarily let themselves be eaten by their own offspring in an act of filial cannibalism known as suicidal matrophilia.Unlike most spiders, who are usually solitary and territorial,…