I found this male black widow occupying a web along with two other live males and one dead male. The female was also in the same web. I wish I had a photo to show the size comparison between the male and female, but they seemed to be having a tiff and were at opposite ends of the web.

The blacker colored female was easily 3-4 times the size of the brown colored males. It hardly looked like it would be a fair fight. In researching the myth that the female cannibalizes the smaller male after being impregnating is not totally true. Nor has it ever been documentmented.

And it is now being reported that the reverse of who ate whom also exists.

“Black widow spiders get their names from the belief that the female devours her partner after sex. But this gruesome ritual doesn’t always happen after mating and sometimes, the roles are even reversed, researchers say.

For choosy female black widows, sexual cannibalism is an extreme way to assert their partner preference, with less desirable males more likely to be chased down and eaten after they insert their sperm-coated palps into a female.

But in the species Micaria sociabilis, males are more likely to eat the females than be eaten, a new study found.” Megan Gannon – Live Science web site

It is just a spider eat spider world we live in, find some peace ††† en theos ††† jim work