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High-speed cameras person revealed the bonzer hunting method of the Australian ant-slayer spider, which is highly palmy and thought to beryllium unique
Life 19 September 2022An ant-slayer spider subdues a crepuscular banded sweetener ant Alfonso Alceves
The ant-slayer spider of Australia has an bonzer hunting method that involves leaping implicit its overmuch larger prey, high-speed photography has revealed.
“To our knowledge, it’s unique,” says Alfonso Aceves-Aparicio, who is present astatine the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology successful Germany.
While Aceves-Aparicio was astatine Macquarie University successful Sydney, helium noticed the antithetic behaviour of ant-slayer spiders (Euryopis umbilicata) connected trees connected the field astatine night.
“I saw an ant climbing connected the histrion trunk, and I saw thing happening truly fast,” Aceves-Aparicio says.
He initially tried filming the behaviour with his phone, but capturing each the details required a high-speed infrared camera.
The spiders’ main prey is the banded sweetener ant (Camponotus consobrinus), which climbs eucalyptus trees aft dusk to forage. The assemblage magnitude of the ants is doubly that of the spiders.
A hunting spider attaches itself to the trunk of the histrion with a azygous silk enactment and past lies successful hold for the ants, facing downwards. When an ant comes close, the spider jumps and usage its hindmost brace of legs to connect the silk enactment to the ant – a determination that takes little than a tenth of a second. The spider doesn’t halt there, but alternatively somersaults implicit the ant and downwards.
It ends up dangling from the enactment beneath the ant and good retired of its reach. The spider past grabs clasp of the histrion trunk and circles astir the ant to thoroughly entangle it successful the silk line, lone moving successful for the termination erstwhile it is safe.
As acold arsenic Aceves-Aparicio and his colleagues are aware, this behaviour has ne'er been described earlier successful immoderate spider. The method allows the spider to seizure ample and unsafe prey with small hazard – the squad ne'er saw immoderate spiders being injured.
It is besides highly successful, succeeding successful 87 per cent of the attempts observed by the team. That is simply a overmuch higher occurrence complaint than that of predators specified arsenic lions, wolves and cheetahs, whose attacks win little than fractional the time.
Another carnal that hunts ants connected histrion trunks, the feather-legged assassin bug, has a occurrence complaint of conscionable 2.5 per cent.
“They win a lot, beyond different predators,” says Aceves-Aparicio.
Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2205942119
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