Stegodyphus lineatus
The act of reproduction, regarding the female, leads to an increase of digestive enzymes. This allows her to eat more prey and to stock more nutrients. The digestive enzymes then start to digest the inside of the organism itself, except for the heart, guts, and mostly the ovaries. Once the offspring are born, and until the mother dies, the mother regurgitates for two weeks the fluids stocked inside as highly nutritive food for the progeny. Ninety-five per cent of the mother's mass is digested by the offspring. They will grow to three times their original size between their birth and dispersion. During the period when female spiders are caring for their hatched offspring, the mothers do not eat, and their offspring only eat the food that the mother regurgitates along with the mother's body at the end of this time.
Extracellular digestion
The regulation of nutrient acquisition appears to be controlled by general phenomena. Only a small group of enzymes, mostly hydrolases, can be detected in the culture filtrate of well-fed fungi. This suggests that specific inducers control the manufacture and release of enzymes for degradation. The most common complex carbohydrate available in the environment is cellulose. In the absence of glucose, detection of cellulose, for instance, induces the expression of celluloses. As a consequence, fungi specifically target the breakdown of the cellulose in their environment, and do not waste energy on the unnecessary formation of enzymes for degradation of molecules that may not be present. Fungi have an efficient process to gain energy.