Move over, meat-eating spiders. There is a rare vegetarian spider in town! Unlike the other 40,000 predatory spider species that typically feed on insects and other prey, the Bagheera kiplingi is the first known spider that predominantly and deliberately dines on plants.
Found in Mexico and Central America, the Bagheera spider mainly eats the high-protein tips, known as Beltian bodies, of acacia plants. But munching on those leafy greens is not an easy task for the vegetarian spider. Spending its entire life on the acacia, the spider has to avoid aggressive ants that reside in the plant’s hollow thorns and fiercely guard and protect the leaves. The jumping spider evades the ants by living on the tips of old leaves which are usually unprotected by the ants. When it is time to eat, the spider, with excellent eyesight, waits and watches. When it spots an opening, the spider goes in, grabs a leaf and scampers away with the leaf in its mouth.
According to Christopher J. Meehan from Villanova University ,”This is really the first spider known to specifically ‘hunt’ plants; it is also the first known to go after plants as a primary food source.”
The spider, first discovered by Eric J. Olson in 2001 in Costa Rica, was later observed in Mexico by Meehan in 2007. The two teams of researchers collaborated and documented their observations in high-definition video recordings and through direct observations in the dry forests of Costa Rica, Mexico and Belize. The findings, Herbivory in a Spider Through Exploitation of an Ant-Plant Mutualism, are published in the October 12th edition of the journal Current Biology.
A short video of the spider is available on LiveScience.
Phidippus princeps jumping spider photo Opo Terser
