Prolonged milk provisioning and extended maternal care in the milking spider Toxeus magnus: biological implications and questions unresolved

Abstract

Prolonged milk provisioning and extended parental care for nutritionally independent offspring, previously considered to only co-occur in long-lived mammals (Clutton-Brock, 1991; Royle et al., 2012), were recently reported in the reproduction of the milking spider, Toxeus magnus (Chen et al. 2018). Newly hatched T. magnus spiderlings require 53 days to develop to maturity, with an average adult body length of 6.6 mm. The mother provides milk droplets to her newly hatched spiderlings until they develop into subadults (~38 days old), during which their body lengths increase from 0.9 mm at birth to 5.3 mm at weaning. Although spiderlings can forage for themselves at around 20 days old, they remain in the breeding nest for weeks after maturity.