Staying Alive
"Pre-copulatory sexual cannibalism by females affects male and female reproductive success in profoundly different ways," write biologists from Denmark's Aarhus University in one of the great understatements of scientific literature.
It's indeed better not to die before mating. To this end, male nursery-web spiders, driven by the reproductive imperative but wary of cannibalistic females, present them with silk-wrapped food bundles, then fall over and pretend to be dead. Once she's started to eat, the male comes to life and initiates copulation.
Image: Female (left) and male (right) in the face-to-face position grasping the gift. (Maria J. Albo/BMC Evolutionary Biology)