Spiders have no shortage of strategies to capture their prey. Some hunt in packs, others set traps and some even mimic the pheromones of their prey’s mate. But even so, less than 1% of spider species go after ants. The six-legged insects are fierce, and many are venomous adversaries with sharp, hedge-trimmer-like mandibles.
That’s why Alfonso Aceves-Aparicio, a behavioural biologist, was surprised one night during a walk home from Macquarie University in Sydney, when he passed by a Eucalyptus tree.
“I saw a reddish blob hanging off of the tree trunk,” he said. And as he got closer he realised it was an ant attached to the silk line of a much smaller spider. As Aceves-Aparicio circled the tree, he noticed more spiders that seemed to be waiting around.
He picked an ant off the ground and placed it on the tree, where it began to move towards one of the spiders. When it got near the ant, the spider began moving frantically and, faster than a blink of an eye, was gone. Aceves-Aparicio thought the spider must have fallen off the tree, but then he noticed the ant hanging from the tree trunk, attached to a silk thread.
Soon after this, Aceves-Aparicio shifted the focus of his research to Euryopis umbilicata spiders and their daring hunting behaviour. He and colleagues detailed what they discovered about the Cirque du Soleil-worthy performance these spiders use to kill ants — acrobatics so impressive that the researchers nicknamed them “ant-slayers.” The work was published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
To get an idea of how often these spiders preyed on ants, Aceves-Aparicio and colleagues collected silk-covered carcasses from a large group of Eucalyptus trees and found that, of 182 carcasses collected, 181 were ants, and more than 90% of those ants were Camponotus consobrinus, also known as banded sugar ants.
The researchers then placed banded sugar ants close to the spiders on Eucalyptus trees in that same area and recorded what they saw with high-speed video cameras. The researchers found that, when an ant was in close range or, more often, made contact with a spider, the spider would flip its body over the ant, attaching silk to it in the process.
“It’s almost like an action movie stuntman,” said Marie Herberstein, a behavioural ecologist at Macquarie University and a co-author of the study. “Or like Spider-Man, pulling out the piece of silk and sticking it in the right spot before they continue to tumble.” — NYT
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