animals, they're just like stars

In his studies of fishing spiders, for example, J. Chadwick Johnson, now at Arizona State University, has discovered that some juvenile female spiders are exceptionally voracious predators and thus grow into beefy, fecund adults. But the avarice has a potential downside. The big-mouthed female spiders have a nasty habit of cannibalizing potential mates before copulation, and without sperm to fertilize their eggs, all their hard-won superfecundity could go to waste.

and this is good too:

Scientists suspect that small inherited predispositions are either enhanced or suppressed by experience, and computer models show that tiny discrepancies at the start can become enormous over time, through feedback loopings of positive reinforcement. Evidence is also emerging that certain physical setpoints affect temperament globally. Notable among such setpoints is the relative rate at which one’s nervous system processes sensory information.