{"id":523454,"date":"2026-03-06T23:11:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T23:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/523454\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T23:11:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T23:11:12","slug":"dance-pluck-then-paralyse-the-riskiest-date-night-in-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/523454\/","title":{"rendered":"Dance, pluck\u2026 then paralyse: the riskiest date night in nature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Discover the spider puts its mate in a trance. Mating may be one of the riskiest things a male spider ever does. Females are often larger, potentially aggressive and pack a venomous bite.<\/p>\n<p>For the desert grass spider of the southwestern USA, an interesting arms race has developed. The females produce a pheromone that acts as a siren song for males, who have left the safety of their web in pursuit of a mate.<\/p>\n<p> Upon meeting, the male begins to dance. His repertoire is known to include 21 different moves, combining abdomen wiggles and leg waves that he uses to advertise himself.<\/p>\n<p>Working his way towards the female&#8217;s web, he begins to pluck its strands before unleashing his own chemical weapon &#8211; a pheromone that induces a motionless trance in the female, allowing him to mate with her safely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Discover the spider puts its mate in a trance. Mating may be one of the riskiest things a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":523455,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[64,63,128,338],"class_list":["post-523454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523454\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/523455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}