The Utterly Bewildering Vegetarian Spider

Spiders are predators, right? Webs, catching flies, stashing them for later. You know how it works. They’re the personification of terrifying non-human predators. Too many legs, too many eyes. Shelob and Aragog. Teeming baby spiders, crawling on their backs. They’re the stuff of nightmares.

Until you meet one that isn’t. This is Bagheera kiplingi — named after the panther in The Jungle Book, and the book’s author. Out of the approximately 40,000 identified species of spiders, it’s the only vegetarian. B. Kiplingi feeds on nutrient rich buds on acacia plants. According to the new research identifying the spider as vegetarian, its hunting skills come into use elsewhere. The acacia is defended by ants, who take shelter in the hollow needles of the plant. The ants attempt to defend the buds in exchange for food and a place to hunker down. The spider then leaps from thorn to thorn, handily avoiding the ants and still gaining its meals.

“It is utterly surreal,” says researcher Christopher Meehan, “to see a spider use such effective hunting strategies to hunt a plant.”

Normally, I imagine the spider’s silk would suffer from a lack of meat, as the web is primarily made of protein. However, jumping spiders don’t make webs (iirc), so I think this wouldn’t be an issue.

[via NatGeo]