Nephilinae
spider family
Nephilinae is a spider subfamily in the family Araneidae, commonly referred to as golden orb-weavers. It has also been treated as the family Nephilidae. The various genera in the subfamily were formerly placed in Tetragnathidae. All nephiline genera partially renew their webs.
Reproductive behavior
The genera Herennia, Nephilengys and Nephilingis display extreme sexually driven selection. The pedipalps of these genera have become highly derived by evolving enlarged, complex palpal bulbs which break off inside the females' copulatory openings after copulation. The broken palps serve as mating plugs, which makes future matings with a mated female more difficult. These genera of spiders also participate in mate guarding; a mated male will stand guard by his female and chase off other males, thereby increasing the mated male's paternity share. Mated males are castrated in the process of mate plugging, though this may be an advantage in mate guarding, as mated males have been observed to fight more aggressively and win more frequently than virgin males. So while the female spiders are still at least potentially polygamous, the males have become monogamous.
“Nephilinae” enters the record as spider family. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nephilinae, spider and family can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q10670. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nephilinae” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.