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To compete well in a certain species' social structure, a parent may be compelled to practice filial cannibalism to limit the amount of energy and time they spend raising their young. Males may compete for mating opportunities by eating the offspring of a female to make that female more sexually receptive or to re-mate.
The offspring are born with specific dentition that they can use to peel and eat the outer epidermal layer of their mother's skin. Young move around their mother's bodies, using their lower jaws to lift and peel the mother's skin while vigorously pressing their heads against her abdomen. To account for this, the epidermis of brooding females ...
Gerbils, on the other hand, no longer commit infanticide once they have paired with a female, but actively kill and eat other offspring when young. The females of this species behave much like male mice, hunting down other litters except when rearing their own. [14]
In many instances of nonparental infanticide in carnivores, the male of a species kills the young of a female to make her sexually receptive, e.g. brown bears. When one or two new male lions defeat and exile the previous males of a pride, the conqueror(s) will often kill any existing young cubs fathered by the losers. [3]
Female Hanuman langurs are known to utilize paternity confusion through concealed ovulation. To protect their young from infanticide, many species of primate mothers will form social monogamous pairs to prevent paternal infanticide. In these pairs, the males will mate with other females but live exclusively with one female as a socially ...
A couple of Araneus diadematus.The courting male is wrapped by the female before it has successfully copulated. Many cultures, such as South Africa and Slovakia, [1] believe that the male (usually significantly smaller than the female, down to 1% of her size as seen in Tidarren sisyphoides) is likely to be killed by the female after the coupling, or sometimes even before intercourse has been ...
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Although females often instigate sexual cannibalism, reversed sexual cannibalism has been observed in the spiders Micaria sociabilis [50] [51] and Allocosa brasiliensis. [52] [53] In a laboratory experiment on M. sociabilis, males preferred to eat older females. This behavior may be interpreted as adaptive foraging, because older females have ...