Sperm packet.

[Talkenlate04]

Well tonight I was mating some Ts and I had something new happen. The pair below got to know each other very quickly (under 5 minutes) The male was not shy and neither was she! So the male dives in for an insert but its a half butt try that nicks her furrow:wall: , but it still causes him to discharge the sperm packet anyway. Well she turned to walk back to her burrow and the packet fell out! Its even shaped like the palp! The part that really amazes me is the packet itself is much harder then I thought it would be. I doubt I will succeed in getting her paired again, so this try with her is more then likely a lost cause now but Ill try few more times just in case she knows she is fertilized yet.

 

[WARPIG]

Thats pretty wicked indeed!!! Great pic.


PIG-

 

[seanbond]

interesting........

 

[crpy]

Amazing pic Ryan, who the heck has ever seen that before, sheesh:clap:

 

[arachyd]

You could get out the CO2 for a quick artificial insemination attempt.

 

[clam1991]

eww your holding spider sperm...

 

[xhexdx]

I wonder why you don't see these when females molt out after breeding?

 

[Moltar]

So the male dives in for an insert but its a half butt try that nicks her furrow:wall: , but it still causes him to discharge the sperm packet anyway.

People and spiders are more alike than we choose to realize. Isn't this a typical reaction in recently matured male homo sapiens?

 

[Travis K]

LOL, Ryan has sperm on his fingers. You are such a voyeurist!

JK, That is really neat, and yeah why not try to artificially inseminate?

 

[DrAce]

Actually, solid sperm is quite a common animal trick. Even mice leave a hard waxy solid lump (which is almost impossible to remove) for about 15 hours after mating.

There's a couple of reasons why this is useful for the animal.

Firstly, it's a plug. Ain't no other sperm getting through it.

Secondly, it's hard to remove (although, in this case, not that hard... normally hard to remove).

Thirdly, it's often quite resiliant, and helps to protect the sperm within.

Human sperm undergoes a similar effect - it often becomes much more fluid several minutes (like 5-30) after ejaculation. In this case, there is a quite complicated timing mechanism placed within the semen to allow this to happen. Protein binds the sperm. The semen contains a protease which will digest this... but it's zinc dependant. Semen also contains zinc - but it's bound in another protein. A second protease slowly digests the zinc-binding protein, which then allows the first protease to slowly gain activity, digesting the protein which makes the semen 'gloopy'.

I don't specifically know what is actually going on to make the spider semen so hard - but I'll wager some money that it's a similar process.

 

[Talkenlate04]

Interesting stuff there Drace.

I wish I had a microscope. I really wanted to see how long the sperm would have lived outside a Ts body.
So do you think the packet dissolves when the eggs are being laid to fertilize them? Or is the packet dropped in the egg sac bowl with the eggs and the sperm start swimming in the fluid to get to an egg?

 

[dtknow]

And we thought we knew everything that could go wrong during a breeding!

Isn't it just a small miracle when everything works out perfectly?(in that case, Ryan must be a wizard)

 

[Talkenlate04]

At least one of the ornata breedings that night went the way it should have! But you can see three annoying mites on the furrow of this female.

 

[crpy]

dump some hypoaspis in there.

 

[dtknow]

Eww...now what to do about them there? Those are bad mites right?

Considering it took me a few seconds to see em in the photos I wonder how many people's T's(mine included) have mites w/o us ever knowing?

 

[arachyd]

Looks like some eye monster from a bad 60's science fiction movie.

 

[DrAce]

Interesting stuff there Drace.

I wish I had a microscope. I really wanted to see how long the sperm would have lived outside a Ts body.
So do you think the packet dissolves when the eggs are being laid to fertilize them? Or is the packet dropped in the egg sac bowl with the eggs and the sperm start swimming in the fluid to get to an egg?

My guess, and it's really not much more than a guess, is that the packet is either liquified by the female (not so likely), or dropped into the egg sac where the fluid they are deposited in has proteases which dissolve the packet, capacitate the sperm, and get them to where they need to be.

Sperm have to undergo a reaction called 'capacitation' which 'activates' them... in mammals this normally happens in the vagina, uterus, or oviduct (fallopian tubes in humans). If they don't undergo this reaction they can't then bind to eggs (well... they don't very well). It's all pretty cool. It's also species specific. As is the reaction which follows the binding of the sperm to the egg - the acrisome reaction.

In spiders, I really don't know. Again, my hunch is that it all happens in the egg sac.

 

[Talkenlate04]

So then in theory I could have kept that packet and tossed it into the females bowl of webbing just before or just after the eggs were laid and it might be useful?
I guess without knowing how long they can live out side of a male or female T that can't be answered.

 

[DrAce]

So then in theory I could have kept that packet and tossed it into the females bowl of webbing just before or just after the eggs were laid and it might be useful?
I guess without knowing how long they can live out side of a male or female T that can't be answered.

Based on nothing more than my suspicion, then probably yes.

I wonder if there is a text-book on invertebrate reproduction...

Go-Go-Gadget-Google!

 

[DrAce]

So then in theory I could have kept that packet and tossed it into the females bowl of webbing just before or just after the eggs were laid and it might be useful?
I guess without knowing how long they can live out side of a male or female T that can't be answered.

You could test this hypothesis by taking a little of the sac fluid and dropping it on the pellet. It would soften up, while my guess is that water won't soften it.

I would think that the pellet would be viable for quite some time 'outside' of the animal, especially since the pellet never really goes inside at all (unless my understanding of the female tarantula anatomy is completely out).