So each Summer, for the past 3 years, I have fostered and fed red-back spiders. I catch them in my yard (in Australia of course) in the hopes of keeping them away from my animals, and I can’t bear to kill them, so I keep them. They’re homed separately, stacked on top of each other. I’ve grown unexpectedly attached to my little, fatal, towering-death army.
For Matjaz Kuntner, it was just another evening trek through southwestern China’s Yunnan rain forest—until his headlamp illuminated a strand of spider silk.
That’s not so surprising on its own. But what attracted the
arachnologist’s attention is the silk appeared to attach a leaf to a
tree branch. After looking closer, Kuntner realized one of these leaves
was actually a spider.
“If there’s a web, there’s a spider,” says Kuntner, of the
Smithsonian Institution and the Evolutionary Zoology Laboratory in
Slovenia.
The arachnid uses its silk to attach leaves to tree branches, and then hides among the branches, according to a new study in the Journal of Arachnology.
The researchers still aren’t sure why the spider does this, but they
believe it’s likely to hide from predators or sneak up on prey…
סלומה 