‘Surreal’ vegetarian spider found
Matt Kaplan for National Geographic News
A new discovery has taken the bite out of spiders’ status as
meat-eaters.
A tropical jumping spider that eats mostly plant buds has been
identified, a new study says, making it the only known vegetarian out of
some 40,000 spider species.
|
Bagheera, a tropical jumping spider that eats mostly plant buds
|
In the late 1800s, naturalists named the spider Bagheera kiplingi
after a panther in British author Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 children’s book
The Jungle Book.
“At that time in history, all the (naturalists) had was a tattered
dead specimen”, a biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a
study leader Christopher Meehan said.
“They had no idea what it ate. But perhaps they knew that jumping
spiders were cat-like in their movements, and (they) decided to name the
spider after the agile panther Bagheera in Kipling’s book”.
Utterly Surreal
Between 2001 and 2008, Meehan and colleagues studied the spider in
its tropical habitat in southeastern Mexico and northwestern Costa Rica.
They observed that the spiders ate nutrient-rich buds that grow on
acacia plants.
The acacias are also home to a species of ant that live in the
plants’ hollow thorns. In a classic example of mutualism, the ants
protect the plant in return for shelter and food, Meehan said.
Yet the fast, stealthy Bagheera has figured out how to leap from
thorn to thorn to collect its meal, while avoiding the highly aggressive
ants.
Though the spider does occasionally snack on ant larvae, the bulk of
their diet is plants, Meehan said.
“It is utterly surreal”, he said, to see a spider use such effective
hunting strategies to hunt a plant.
Study published October 12 in the journal Current Biology. |
