I wonder if the researchers in this article have made any observations of the prevalence of males mating with juvenile females when mature females are present in the environment.

Carolyn Cramoy
Lake Placid, N.Y.

Maydianne Andrade of the University of Toronto at Scarborough says that no information on that is available yet. She and her team didn’t know about juvenile-spider mating when they did earlier field research that might have offered insight. —S. Milius

From the Nature Index

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