This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

Island View Beach in British Columbia has all the makings of a perfect summer outing.

Great views, seclusion, sand dunes and driftwood,

there's just one minor detail.

That driftwood, it hosts two to three Black Widow spider webs per square meter.

To some people, a beach full of Black Widows

does sound like a nightmare.

But to me, it's awesome, and it's not scary at all.

Catherine Scott studies spider behavior at Simon Fraser University in British

Columbia and in case you're wondering?

I've never been bitten by a black widow and I'm not at all concerned about being bitten by a black widow.

Scott's research brought her to Islandview Beach to study the mating habits of black widow spiders.

The basics are this.

So if you're a male black widow, your goal in life is to find a female and mate with her and father as many of her offspring as possible.

Achieving that goal includes some architectural alterations by the males during their several hours

of courtship.

They snip the female's web to pieces and then bundle the tattered web in their own silk. Scott and her colleagues found that

webs treated this way don't attract other prowling males the same way an

intact web does. Meaning, it's not so much the best male but the first male to arrive that will win if he's able to

To quickly find a female and and reduce her web and the reason this tactic works, the researchers say females encode pheromones, like chemical

personal ads in their webs, advertising their age, hunger level, and mating status.

And the first arriving male's craftsmanship may

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