A small jumping spider has taken to hunting plants instead of bugs. Bagheera kiplingi dodges throngs of aggressive ants to feast on the leaf-tip morsels of acacia shrubs, making it the first mostly vegetarian spider known to science. It's like "a tiger who is eating mainly grass," says retired Swiss arachnologist Rainer Foelix.
Christopher Meehan first noticed B. kiplingi's vegetarian tendencies when taking an undergraduate field course in southeastern Mexico in 2007. Of the world's 40,000 known spiders, none had ever been documented as an herbivore--yet here was B. kiplingi feasting on acacia shrubs. "I thought I had imagined something," recalls Meehan, now a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Almost as surprising was the fact that the spiders were intruding on one of the world's best studied symbioses--the mutualism between acacia shrubs and stinging Pseudomyrmex ants. The ants protect the plants from herbivores, and the plants provide the insects with hollow thorns to nest in and a steady diet of nectar and Beltian bodies, the same minivegetables that B. kiplingi snatches.
A few years before Meehan's field trip, biologist Eric Olson of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, noticed the same thing in northwestern Costa Rica but did not publish his observations. When the two scientists discovered each other, they joined forces; their combined report was recently published.
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Source: Science Now