Washington, Oct 28: Casual dating can be dangerous. A study of spiders shows female Wolf Spiders will eat strange-looking males that try to mate with them, but spare and even hook up with familiar-looking males. The findings provide not just an interesting insight into spider behavior, but may help explain actions by ''higher'' animals, said Arachnologist Eileen Hebets of Cornell University in New York. ''The female is using earlier experience that is going to affect her mate choice later,'' Hebets said in a telephone interview. ''It is reasonable to expect that is a common thing in other animals.'' Hebets worked with Schizocosa Uetzi Spiders, commonly known as Wolf Spiders. They have an elaborate courtship ritual in which males arch their brown or black forelegs and vibrate their bodies. The female, which is slightly larger, can choose to mate, to run away or to eat her suitor. Sometimes she eats the hapless male after mating, Hebets said. Hebets painted the legs of male spiders either brown or black with nail polish, and then raised females with either brown- or black-marked males, but not both. When the females became sexually mature, she would put into their boxes a male of either color and watch what happened. The females were not exposed to males they already knew -- just males marked with the same shade of nail polish. ''They just look like somebody they might know. None saw the same male ever,'' Hebets said. Writing in the proceedings of the National Academy Of Sciences, Hebets said the females were more likely to eat males painted with the ''wrong'' color instead of mating with him. The more a female had been exposed to males with their legs painted a certain color, the more likely she was to eat a male painted with the other color, Hebets found. Bureau Report