This is scientific American's 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

For male Black Widow spiders, finding a mate is risky business.

They have to go on an epic journey.

Catherine Scott, an arachnologist at the University of Toronto.

At the population she studies on Canada's Vancouver Island, she says the spiders have only a

12% chance of surviving their

scramble over sand dunes and plants. And they have very poor eyesight and they're

traveling at night. So one way males find females is by sniffing from afar the pheromone

perfume on their webs. But Scott has now discovered an alternative way males

find mates by subjecting the spiders to a race.

For each male, before he started, we weighed him in on a tiny scale

and we painted him with racing stripes

and measured the length of his legs.

We had a finish line of pheromone emitting females, and we released males at various

distances from those females to see whether they arrived at a female's web or not, and how fast

they got there.

What surprised her was that the males that started farthest, nearly 200 feet away,

actually traveled fastest towards females. And the reason, they poach the paths of their rivals, who spin continuous silk

drag lines as they move.

These spiders are much more adept at walking and running on silk than they are on the

ground. So we realized that maybe the males that we released

...